Social Cohesion and Community during Periods of Change

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Friday 6th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, it is a daunting privilege to follow both an Archbishop and a Methodist preacher, but I participate in this debate because it is one of the few occasions in the year when we can hope to hear from the Lords spiritual—I welcome in particular the most reverend Primate’s contribution—some spiritual guidance based on the gospels, rather than on the Labour Party manifesto and the latest progressive critique of the last Government.

I hope to achieve a positive response and some answers from the Lords spiritual to the sort of questions that engage me as both a Christian and a Conservative, which are rarely addressed because it is assumed—I hope to challenge this, but not in an aggressive way—that if you are a Conservative you cannot be a Christian, and if you are a Christian you cannot be a Conservative. I want to think particularly about the political implications, if any, of our Lord’s injunction to love our neighbour as ourselves. When Christ asked that question, “Who is my neighbour?”, he told us the parable of the Samaritan. I do not need to repeat it, but we can all agree that one thing that shows is that there can be no discrimination between Samaritan and Jew, between Christian and Muslim, between any different people, on the basis of their colour. That is a clear lesson of that parable, but some conclude that our obligations must therefore extend to the whole world, and that our job to love our neighbour as ourselves means that we must love everybody throughout the world equally. Dickens parodied that in Bleak House, in a chapter on telescopic philanthropy, in which he had the characters Mrs Jellyby, who devoted herself to the Tockahoopo Indians, and Mrs Pardiggle, whose “rapacious benevolence” was directed towards the tribes of the Borrioboola-Gha in Africa, to the detriment of the people of their own country and even their own families.

At the other extreme are those who interpret the parable as meaning only that we should help those we personally come in contact with, and that if we meet someone wounded by the wayside we should help them, especially if others are passing by. But even in a community where everybody was motivated by genuine, generous, Christian charity, leaving that philanthropy and charity to anarchically express themselves would mean that some people get a lot of help and others get no help.

The Church itself recognised at an early stage that it had to create an embryonic welfare state. It pooled resources and helped both its own members and others in the society around it. The earliest Church, in due course, became a sort of welfare state through the churches and the monasteries. Then, after the abolition of the monasteries, the state began to take over with the Poor Law and, ultimately, the modern welfare state. As a result, we have moved a long way from the original Samaritan, who acted voluntarily. We, as members of the welfare state, contribute compulsorily. The Samaritan did not say, “Oh, there is someone in need. I will pluck some money out of the Levite’s wallet and some out of the priest’s wallet and give it to him and claim virtue”. He did it himself with his own means. We have to participate in the welfare state, and we cannot attribute to the welfare state the same moral virtue as we do to the Samaritan. If we did, I would be the most generous person in this place, because as Secretary of State for Social Security I distributed £200 billion of your money, in modern money, to the poor, the needy and so on. But it was not my virtue: I was simply doing what society had decided.

Ultimately, the welfare state exists; we agree to do that, with compulsion on ourselves to contribute, because of a sense of national solidarity. Here, I think we get to some questions that are often ignored. Most of us feel a hierarchy of obligation: to our family, to our immediate friends, then to our nation—of course there is an obligation to people outside our nation, but it is primarily to our nation. I ask the Benches opposite this: is that okay? Is it reasonable that we have a hierarchy of obligation, feel more obligation to those in our own country than to those in others, and feel that other countries should themselves have their welfare states and look after their own people according to the means they have?

Well, I suggest that we have to, because we cannot be open to the whole world; we cannot because our welfare level is greater than the norm, or median, income in many of the countries in the third world. My first career was working in developing countries on aid and development programmes, and the level of incomes then was dramatically below what people on welfare in this country got—so we cannot, for that reason.

Anyway, if we do, to the extent that we do, we find that generous-minded people in this House, who all have their own homes, start allocating housing that would have gone to people on the housing list to people from abroad. That is why there is resentment if there is an excessive influx from abroad—and not illegally: I mean, over the last 18 months, we have allowed a net inflow into this country of the population of Birmingham. Where are we going to build another Birmingham before we can build a single extra house for the people already here? We rarely hear about that from those who find any criticism of mass migration to be improper.

That raises the question: should we accept anybody who manages to get here? It is apparently legitimate that we try to stop them getting here—we try to stop the boats and smash the gangs, and no one has ever criticised Starmer for wanting to do that, but it is a bit odd that, when people manage to get here nonetheless, they are then effectively awarded prizes, very often at the cost of the least well-off in this country. Matthew Parris equated it to a rugby match: you can try to stop people getting across the line, but as soon as they get across the line and touch down, they are granted the prize of five points and can try to convert it into a goal. That is a funny business.

Anyway, it is always the least poor who get here. When I worked in Africa and Asia, none of the poor people I was working among ever talked of the possibility of coming to Europe: it was beyond their comprehension, the costs of travel were so much greater, and the knowledge through media was so much less that they did not. Now, the people who do get here are those who have access to a few thousand pounds, perhaps £10,000, which is an enormous amount of money in those countries—and we are saying, “Oh, well, we’re generous. We’ll allow them to stay. We mustn’t try to stop them”. I simply ask the question: why is it reasonable to try to prevent them coming here but not fair to try to deter them from coming here, as we did through the Rwanda programme?

There are lots of issues that we—and I—have to wrestle with, and I would like the bishops occasionally to wrestle with them. Is it reasonable that we have national solidarity or is that an evil and wicked thing? Is it reasonable that we give priority to the poor in our own country while recognising that charity, although it begins at home, does not end at home? We may have to offer help to countries that are overwhelmed by some disaster, but then, normally, we should expect people in other countries to look after themselves and our duty is to the poor, needy and vulnerable in our own community.

Climate Agenda

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Thursday 24th October 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lilley]

That this House takes note of the impact of His Majesty’s Government’s climate agenda on jobs, growth and prosperity.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great and somewhat unexpected privilege to open this debate. I particularly look forward to the maiden speech of my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead. It is fitting that her first contribution should be to this debate, since the net-zero commitment is very much her personal legacy. It also gives me a chance to thank her for what she and your Lordships may feel was a less wise part of her legacy, which was nominating me to this House.

It is hard to overstate how crucial cheap energy is for economic growth and prosperity. The quadrupling of oil prices in 1974 ended three decades of rapid growth in western economies. Energy price rises have invariably been followed by a slowdown in growth. On the other hand, thanks to shale oil and gas in America, that country has had cheaper energy and grown faster than other western economies, and China’s extraordinary growth has been fuelled by cheap coal.

Let me start with a few facts about climate change and the climate agenda impacts. First, Britain has reduced its territorial emissions of CO₂ more than any other major economy and they are now back to the level they were in 1879. Secondly, Britain has more offshore wind power than any other country bar China, not to mention its onshore wind, solar and bio energy.

Thirdly, despite or because of this, British industry pays the highest electricity prices in Europe. They doubled in real terms over the two decades up to the start of the Ukraine war, even though real gas prices remained largely unchanged over that period.

Fourthly, we have already lost most of our aluminium industry and are losing our primary steel-making capacity and, with it, thousands of jobs. We are seeing the Grangemouth refinery turning into an import terminal and other British refineries under threat. We import an increasing proportion of energy-intensive goods, such as cement and bricks.

Fifthly, when our manufacturing industry moves abroad, it does not reduce global emissions at all—far from it. We now import many carbon-intensive products, so the reduction in Britain’s carbon footprint is only 36%, much less than the near halving of our reported territorial emissions.

Finally, the Government propose to accelerate the move to net zero regardless of cost, to prevent new North Sea exploration and instead import oil and gas, and to ignore or deny the impact this will have on our energy costs, growth and jobs.

This is an unusually significant debate because, as far as I can tell, it is the first time that Parliament has formally debated the impact on jobs, growth and prosperity of our decision to decarbonise our economy. Our failure to do so has been part of a collective institutional failure by Governments of all parties, both Houses of Parliament, the BBC, the Climate Change Committee and other public bodies to permit or promote an informed debate on the economic costs and benefits of net zero.

Costs were never discussed during the passage of the Climate Change Act in 2008, nor during the 90-minute debate committing us to net zero in 2019. It is extraordinary that we still have no official cost-benefit analysis of net zero, five years after embarking on the project.

Long ago, our national broadcaster formally decided not to give airtime to any views that might undermine public support for net zero. I discovered this when expressing doubts not about the science of global warming, which is rock solid, but about its scale and impact. The BBC published an apology “for giving voice to Peter Lilley”, removed the offending programme from the BBC iPlayer lest other people hear my voice, sent the producers on a re-education course and banished me from their studios on this issue ever since. Now my absence is no great loss to me or the nation, but our national broadcaster’s refusal to allow serious debate on the costs of the most expensive commitment since the welfare state is a travesty.

The most egregious failure has been that of the Climate Change Committee, which should have provided unbiased estimates of costs for public debate. I am glad that my noble friend Lord Deben will be able to explain why it has refused to do so. It even spent large sums of taxpayers’ money resisting a freedom of information request for details of its forecast that net zero would cost the nation 1% to 2% of GDP by 2050. Many assumed that this was the cost of getting to net zero but, actually, this is the cost we will face after 2050 once we have eliminated our emissions. The CCC has not calculated the cost of getting there; maybe its forecasting instrument is like one of those telescopes that can focus with great clarity on distant objects but renders anything near at hand a blurred and fuzzy image. There seems to be no other reason for not giving us the costs of getting to 2050.

The CCC’s reluctance to publish its workings was perhaps understandable given that it was so optimistic but, as it turns out, that is true of estimates produced by most public bodies. Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith—the lead author of the Royal Society’s report on the cost of large-scale electricity storage—recently pointed out that all official estimates were grossly optimistic, and he was honest enough to include his own, by the Royal Society. It is sad that we do not have the information on which we can have an honest and informed debate.

True believers in net zero are reluctant to discuss its costs because they have convinced themselves that there are none. It will give us cheap energy and boost growth by creating new jobs in new industries, exporting clean technologies worldwide, making the world greener and ourselves richer. How wonderful if that were true. There is an old saying that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is not true. I hope that wind power, in particular, because we have lots of it, will one day be cheaper than fossil fuels, but it patently is not yet. If wind and solar are cheaper, why have our electricity prices doubled as they have replaced fossil fuels? If renewables are cheaper, why is our electricity more expensive than in other European countries, which have less than us? If renewables are cheaper, why do they need subsidy?

Apologists say that those are the costs of old technologies and that the costs are coming down. The first part is true, although it is a shame they did not tell us at the time. Dieter Helm has calculated that Britain wasted up to £100 billion by investing prematurely in immature technology, rather than waiting until it was cost effective.

The Secretary of State assured us last month that, on the basis of recent auctions, renewables are the cheapest form of power to build and operate. Unfortunately, that is simply not true. The latest auction price for offshore wind was £82 per megawatt hour in today’s money, whereas his own department’s figures—for reference, on page 24 of the Electricity Generation Costs 2023 document—put the cost to build and operate a new gas plant at less than £60 per megawatt hour. Does the Secretary of State repudiate his own departmental figures?

Moreover, this is only half the story, because the comparison is not like for like. Wind is intermittent, and Dieter Helm advised the Government that, to make a true comparison, the costs of wind should include the cost of back-up generators or storage. Electricity that is not there when you want it is less valuable than electricity that is.

My economics lecturer taught us this by the old fable of the two New York bakers. One advertised bagels at 50 cents each, the other opposite at a dollar. A customer went to the cheaper baker and asked for a bagel. “Sorry, we’re out of bagels”, he was told. So he went to the other store and asked if they had any bagels. When the shopkeeper gave him one and charged him a dollar, he protested, “But the shop opposite only charges 50 cents a bagel”. “Well, why didn’t you go there?” “I did, but he’s out of bagels just now”. To which the other shopkeeper replied, “When I’m out of bagels, I only charge 50 cents”. Wind may be as cheap as other things when it is available, but it is a lot more expensive when it is not.

Electricity when it is not there when you want it is less valuable electricity, so you need back-up gas plants or storage. Back-up gas plants are doubly expensive because they can operate only when the wind is not blowing and they in turn need carbon capture and storage, which, even if it can be made to work with gas-fired stations, which it has not yet, will add further costs—again doubly so, because it will operate only part-time.

The second leg of the too good to be true story is that if we plough ahead with decarbonising our economy supply, we will enrich ourselves by generating new export industries. The Industry Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, who pursued the Sue Gray route to the upper echelons of the Labour Party, was given a little section of his own in the Labour manifesto, in which he said that

“by accelerating the transition to clean, homegrown energy”

we will not only

“end the era of high energy bills”

but be

“helping ourselves and exporting our solutions worldwide. But if we choose to go slowly, others will provide the answers, and ultimately we’ll end up buying these solutions rather than selling them”.

Where has he been for the past 20 years? Far from choosing to go slowly, we have outpaced other countries, but we have had to buy the solutions from abroad. Imports of renewable technologies vastly exceed our exports. Foreign suppliers have finally begun to make wind vanes in this country and assemble generators here, which is welcome, but they are largely for our fields, and those companies are not going to make us an exporter. The only turbines we export are gas turbines, which we are phasing out and urging others to do likewise. The only area where we might take the lead in developing a new industry is small nuclear, which I persuaded the Energy and Climate Change Committee to back a decade ago. I hope this Government will give that project more welly than my Government did.

An honest appraisal of the cost of net zero will conclude that it is bound to be costly. That does not necessarily mean that we should abandon it. If the costs are less than the likely benefits to the world in reducing the impact of global warming, it is worth the world bearing those costs. Of course, Britain’s contribution to global emissions is very small—less than 1%—so our impact alone is negligible. I accept that we must be prepared to make our proportionate contribution to that collective effort.

I know that many noble Lords believe that we should lead the world by going further and faster in that direction. I confess that I have always found the idea that we can lead the world somewhat hubristic—a hangover from our imperial past. So far, the big emitters —China, India and, in future, Africa and Latin America —have made it clear that they do not give a damn what we do. The one thing that we can be sure of is that if we impose such costs on our economy that we self-harm and reduce our emissions by exporting our industry abroad, other countries will take note, learn the lessons from our folly and make sure that they do not follow our lead.

I hope that we can now have an honest, frank, well-informed debate comparing the costs of action with the benefits of action. I am sure that will be a point that my bishop, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans, will make in due course since, although we may not agree on this issue, we agree on the importance of honesty. We can have an honest debate only if it is well informed and if we stop trying to convince ourselves that fairy tales are true. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, I remind the House of my declared interests, particularly as the former chairman of the Climate Change Committee. I particularly welcome the maiden speech of my noble friend. By talking about one nation and handing on to the next generation something better than we have ourselves received, she sums up why I am a conservative. Only when the Conservative Party follows those views are we actually conservative.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, for producing this debate. He is a very old friend, so he will not mind me reminding him a bit about his past. When Margaret Thatcher was off in the United Nations pleading for international action against climate change, he was telling his colleagues in the Cabinet that he did not really accept the arguments about climate change or global warming—

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

That is completely untrue. The noble Lord is making it up.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

I remember the conversation. The noble Lord said, “I’m a statistician, and the statistics don’t prove this”. But it is perfectly true that he now believes it is rock solid, although he does not accept that, if it is, we have to do everything about it because it threatens us all. His speech could be made in any parliament in the whole world, saying, “Climate change is very serious, but not for us, because we’ve got to do this, that and the other. It’s rather bad for our economy, so we won’t do it”. Every country could say that. His is the “After you, Claude” policy: when other people do it, then we do it. That seems to me to be dishonourable—you cannot put that forward. If you believe in climate change and see it as an existential threat, you have to act.

I am proud of a cross-party attitude; all parties have supported this, although my noble friend Lord Lilley did not support the Climate Change Act. We have to realise that there is a difference between accepting the facts and being prepared to act on them. Action means that we do it ourselves first because, if we do not, as the Bishops’ Benches would accept, there is no point in asking people to do as you say.

And the effect of Britain doing it has been remarkable. If I look back to my first days as chairman of the Climate Change Committee, I have to say that I did not expect that we would ever get to the decision in Paris. Nor would I have expected from Boris Johnson, whose leadership was not my favoured one, the remarkable steps forward which we had at Glasgow. The result was that nations throughout the world have signed up to net zero and have begun to ratchet up what they are doing. That is why we have to get back the leadership we lost by doing entirely unacceptable things such as putting off the date by which we were going to have compulsory electric or equivalent cars. That meant that business, as the noble Lord, Lord Browne, pointed out, did not in any way feel the conviction and the certainty that it needs.

Apart from being a Minister for 16 years, I have been a businessman all my life and I know perfectly well that the most important thing in business is to find out the certainties, and the certainties are clear: that climate change will get worse every year and the cost of not doing something about it gets worse every year. The Climate Change Committee has produced a detailed statement about how much it will cost: it will be something around 1% of our gross national product every year. But that is only if we do it—of course, it builds up. If you do not do it, it costs you more and more. The cost of inaction is huge and it is already true.

Because people—who shall be nameless—pressed Mr Cameron, now the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, as Prime Minister, he rowed back on what was called the “green rubbish”. What did he do? It meant that every family in Britain has had to spend at least £1,000 more because we have not moved fast enough into renewable energy. I do get fed up with people who cherry-pick the facts; the facts are quite simple. The basic cost of gas today is £83 per megawatt hour; onshore and solar have just been agreed at £68 per megawatt hour and offshore at £80 per megawatt hour, so already it is clearly lower, and that is with gas not at its highest price. Do we really want to be in the hands of the volatility of the gas price? Do we want to be in the hands of some of the nastiest regimes in the world, or do we want to have our own energy source at a lower price and at a cost we can afford? The figures are all there. The Climate Change Committee has done it year after year, but I have not noticed my noble friend Lord Lilley present at any of the presentations or discussions. So I merely say to him that he should read the documents again and accept that he is on one side and that science, the Church and the Climate Change Committee are on the other.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to everybody who has made fantastic contributions to this excellent debate. I pay particular tribute to the Government spokesman, the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, whom we have just heard. His response to everybody and everything that was said was one of the most fair-minded and constructive that I have heard, not least in fairly representing what I was trying to say—though I am not accusing him of agreeing with me.

I want also to congratulate my noble friend Lady May of Maidenhead on an outstanding maiden speech. It was noteless; it was witty; it was compassionate. We are aware, obviously, of her other great legacy on modern slavery. The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, reminded us of her concern for the just about managing in our own country, and she emphasised her concern for the poorest, who are the greatest victims of climate disasters—when you are hit by a flood, it does not matter to you whether they are more frequent than floods in the past; they are still a disaster. But the reason the poor are vulnerable is that they are poor, and the reason that they are poor is that they do not have the access to cheap energy that makes us rich. If we deprive them of access to cheap and affordable energy they will remain poorer for longer. Even if we in this country think that we can afford excessively high energy costs, we should not try to impose them on the poor and slow down their growth.

I next thank the noble Lord, Lord Deben, who offered my greatest support for what I had to say, since, because he could not refute a word that I had said, he chose to criticise things that I had not said. He criticised me for saying, allegedly, that we should not make any contribution on this front. What I actually said was:

“I accept that we must be prepared to make our proportionate contribution”.


He went on to say that I had said something in Cabinet under Mrs Thatcher, which is simply untrue. I remind him of the exchange we once had in John Major’s Cabinet, which was not about this but about statistics, when he was wrong.

The noble Lord did not respond to the points about why he needed to take costly legal action to prevent publication of the analysis that his committee had done on the cost of climate change avoidance in 2050. My general view is that when people do not want to publish facts it is because they think the facts are rather weak. I assume that is why he did not refer to them.

On the general issue of costs, with the exception of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, almost nobody who was enthusiastic for doing more and spending more and who generally goes around saying that we can do that in a costless fashion commented on the costs I gave. None of them referred to the fact that we have the highest costs of electricity for our industry of any country. One can only assume again that they are embarrassed by the facts. Likewise, when it came to new industries, apart from small nuclear, which I mentioned and have advocated for a long time, nobody gave detail of how these industries are going to generate new prosperity when we have doubled the amount of onshore wind, trebled the amount of offshore wind and quadrupled the amount of solar or whatever it is, when that has not happened so far.

There were a couple of important arguments that it is important for me to address because they go to the heart of the issue. One was on the issue of external costs, which was raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the noble Lords, Lord Willetts and Lord Browne. Theirs was the logical response to what I am putting forward, which is to say: “Yes, you’ve got to balance the costs of doing something against the damage that would be done if you don’t, and the logical way to do that is a carbon tax”. If we take the American Government’s estimates, for example, which say that the carbon tax should be $51 per tonne, which is about the equivalent to $10 per megawatt hour, it does not make any difference to the fact that renewables would still be uneconomic in this country.

Then came the most difficult issue, which people who take my position have to face up to, and that is the threat of existential crisis. If continuing to do nothing—I am not proposing that we do nothing—were likely to result in the extinction of the human race, or even its immiseration, almost no costs would be too great to avoid it. I accept that.

I put down a Question some while ago to the Government asking whether they knew of any peer-reviewed science, or science produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—whose job it is to consider the science—which forecasts that, if we do nothing over the coming centuries, it will lead to the extinction of the human race or even its immiseration. They said that no, there was no such peer-reviewed science, so those who invoke it are invoking something that is not peer-reviewed science, although that does not mean to say that it is wrong. Some things can turn out to be right that have not yet got through the peer review process. But let us not pretend that we are dealing with a threat that scientists have declared to be existential—they have not.

We are left with the central core of the debate: should we have an honest discussion about the costs and benefits of pursuing the path of net zero? I am glad to say that the Church was on my side on that front—that we want an honest debate. We can do that only if the Government and bodies such as the CCC, the National Grid and the Royal Society have the honesty and integrity to admit that about their information. The Royal Society—or the author I cited—has admitted that his figures were underestimates. We can have that debate only if we have that information from those sources in an unbiased way rather than in a campaigning way. I am grateful to everybody for contributing to the beginning of that debate for the first time in Parliament.

Motion agreed.

Rt Hon Dominic Raab MP: Resignation Letter

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Thursday 27th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

Having worked as an adviser, a Minister and a civil servant, I would say that the constitution has these different parts. Political advisers are important and helpful. In most cases, they work well with the Civil Service.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, is it not important to recognise that Ministers have no power to select, reward, promote or demote officials working for them? Likewise, officials should not have the power effectively to dismiss Ministers for whom they work, least of all by making anonymous complaints against them. I was very fortunate, like the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, that my officials were a joy to work with throughout, but some Ministers have perceived some officials to be reluctant to implement their policies and have had to try to find ways of dealing with that, and some officials have perceived Ministers’ responses trying to get them to do that too abrasive, demanding and rude. I sympathise with those who had to duck telephones thrown by Gordon Brown or to deal with Richard Crossman, who said in his diaries that when he found officials reluctant to do his will:

“I bullied them and made a fool of them in front of others, quite often their subordinates”.


I suspect such an approach was counterproductive. Does the Minister agree that it is up to the electorate or elected superiors to get rid of Ministers who cannot deliver, not officials?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

Ministers are of course part of the process of democratic election. I agree with much of what my noble friend said.

Net-zero Emissions: Behaviour Change

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Thursday 20th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the right reverend Prelate on securing this debate and apologise that, through my incompetence, I am speaking the gap—although, sadly, because of events in Downing Street the whole debate is likely to slip not through a gap but into a black hole.

The committee on which the right reverend Prelate and I served called for and received evidence about the lifestyle changes necessary to meet net zero. The sixth carbon budget from the CCC provided the answer:

“Around 10% of the emissions saving in our Balanced Pathway in 2035 comes from … Particularly … an accelerated shift in diets away from meat and dairy products, reductions in waste, slower growth in flights and reductions in travel demand”—


in short, lifestyle changes. The other 90% comes from industry and households adopting new technologies which are intended to enable us to maintain our lifestyles.

The 10% saving from lifestyle changes was far lower than expected and a disappointment to those who wanted to make us adopt more frugal lifestyles, so the committee decided—quite consciously—to omit the 10% figure and, after the report had been drafted, asked officials to find a larger, headline-grabbing figure. They provided two figures, both of which the committee adopted. The first was that 63% of the required savings rely on

“the involvement of the public in some form.”

Apparently, this includes savings from industry deploying carbon capture and storage; I am not sure what public involvement is required in that, but it is certainly not a lifestyle change.

The second, less outrageous, figure was that 32% of savings rely on

“decisions by individuals and households”.

This was rounded up in the committee’s press release, which claimed that

“a third of emission savings … must come from people changing their behaviours.”

That is doubly disingenuous, first since the bulk of the savings comes not from individuals’ decisions but from removing their right to decide to buy fossil-fuelled cars and boilers in future. Secondly, if electric cars and heat pumps work as their advocates claim, they will not require lifestyle changes. We will be able to drive, not cycle or walk, and heat our homes as at present rather than having to adapt to lower temperatures. Yet the bulk of the report claims that behaviour change will involve more active and frugal lifestyles, which will be good for our bodies and souls.

I respect and like my colleagues on the committee, most notably our brilliant chairman, but the committee’s brazen economy with the truth was sadly distressing. Presumably, it was designed to shield the public from inconvenient facts that might undermine their willingness to go along with the net-zero agenda. The Climate Change Committee showed that we could meet net zero with pretty minimal changes of lifestyle, but some people are so eager to manage our lives that they ignored that advice and advocate re-enacting the hugely intrusive policies of the pandemic, which were mercifully temporary, on what must be a permanent basis. I regret that conclusion.

Economy: The Growth Plan 2022

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Monday 10th October 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham; I will take his biblical injunctions to heart. I hope that he will take to heart my observation that there is no free market economist who believes in anything called “trickle-down economics”; that is a fantasy of his imagination.

My noble friend Lord Lamont reminded me that I should perhaps begin with a declaration of interest: as a former Treasury Minister I am a registered bean counter and member of the Treasury orthodoxy, which may be why I voted for Rishi Sunak in the leadership election. However, I passionately want the Prime Minister and Chancellor to succeed, not just because I believe in their central objective; I also wanted Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to succeed, because I want our country to succeed. I am therefore rather upset by the relish that some have shown for the brief adverse market reaction to the Budget. After all, it was brief, which suggests that it was as much about misunderstanding as about the substance. Sterling is back to the level against the euro that it was before the announcement. The dollar has been equally strong against both the pound and the euro—and many other currencies—which has nothing to do with the Budget statement.

Surely we can all agree that the Government’s priority is right. Growth is crucial. Growth, not redistribution, is the only sustainable way to increase living standards and finance improved services. If I may, I will use my four minutes to make a few reflections based on the experience of the 1980s.

First, the impact of the deregulatory measures that we introduced then was in fact greater than we anticipated. Britain moved from being the slowest-growing major economy in Europe to the fastest. But this improvement was slower in emerging than we hoped, and reflected the cumulative effect of a whole range of often small changes. It is therefore very unlikely that the benefits of changes that this Government rightly propose will be felt before the next election. But that is no reason for giving up. The electorate is collectively far more intelligent than many cynics assume. They re-elected the Thatcher Government twice before much of the benefits of their reforms had materialised, because they gave the Government credit for tackling what were manifestly important issues.

Secondly, in the 1980s we tackled many, although not all, of the big regulatory problems, such as scrapping exchange controls, ending the vestiges of a prices and incomes policy which gave the Government control of every single price, wage and dividend in the country, and privatising large swathes of nationalised industries. But that does not mean there is nothing left to do. We could not then tackle the issues covered by the EU’s laws and regulations. Now, thanks to Brexit, we can, so this Government are right to turn their attention to these.

Thirdly, one area we did not tackle, which was at least partly within the scope of domestic law, was planning. There, in my experience, speeding up decision-making, so you know whether you can or cannot do something, is as important as liberalising it, and may be less contentious.

Fourthly, we tend to forget one significant feature that the UK had in the 1980s, which was the development of North Sea oil, which simultaneously strengthened the balance of payments and generated huge tax revenues. The Government are absolutely right to license more North Sea acreage, but the only energy sources which can come on stream speedily are onshore gas and onshore wind. We must face up to the anti-growth coalition, which agitated against shale gas with arguments which, frankly, make anti-vaxxers look positively scientific. More than a million wells have been fracked in the United States without a single building falling down as a result of the micro-seismic events which follow, and without anyone being poisoned by contaminated aquifers, and gas produced domestically emits far less CO₂ than importing LNG. If anyone needs to apologise for our present shortage of secure, affordable energy, it is those who objected to nuclear because it would not come on stream until 2021, to quote Nick Clegg, and who supported frankly scaremongering arguments to stop us exploiting such shale reserves as we have.

EU Retained Law

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Thursday 23rd June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend. It seems quite a long time ago that we were working in Downing Street on the aspiration of reducing regulation. She makes interesting points which one does have to bear in mind in consulting on and considering the way forward.

It is important that we make it easier for small businesses, and it is also true—I am not criticising anybody or any organisation in particular—that familiar regulatory environments, particularly complex ones, are not necessarily as perturbing to very large organisations which have large departments to deal with them as they are to small businesses and would-be innovators and entrants. That is a balance one has to consider across the regulatory environment, including in this exercise before us today.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, I recall that when I went to Brussels as a Treasury Minister or as Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, my brief to discuss forthcoming legislation and regulations invariably said, “Minister, we don’t really want this, but we can’t stop it. Could you try to seek at least one or two of the following half dozen amendments to it?” If we did achieve one or two, that was counted as a great triumph. Will my noble friend insist that departments go back to the briefs that were given to Ministers at the time the regulations went through and look for the changes that we wanted to secure but did not at the time? Will he also reflect on the irony of the Liberal Democrats complaining that secondary legislation will be used to change some of the regulations we inherited, given that they were all introduced under secondary legislation, which gave no option for Parliament to reject them at all?

Finally, since there is time for me to go on, will my noble friend reflect on the fact that the one thing we could do in the past was to gold-plate regulations, which we did? I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Hailsham, on the privy counsellors’ Bench, who introduced a system to try to limit gold-plating of regulations when we implemented those of the EU. Will my noble friend the Minister make sure that when we modify these regulations, we do not succumb again to the temptation to gold-plate them and that we go back to the Hailsham dashboard—it was called something like that—to make sure that we do not make them more regulatory, rather than less?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, a lot was wrapped up in there. I agree with what my noble friend said at the end and with his tribute to my noble friend Lord Hailsham. There is an eternal tendency, partly because of some of the factors I referred to in my previous answer, to gold-plate and overregulate, and it constantly has to be held in check. Perhaps one of the many benefits of this exercise is that it is departments that will have to make the responses, take the work forward under the supervision of the Brexit Opportunities Unit and consider the kind of points that my noble friend makes.

Finding the papers from the past is an interesting challenge. I am sure that most of those have now been publicly released. I read today that the papers of the Blair Government were being released by the National Archives, so I am sure that the briefs to my noble friend are available to all and sundry. Perhaps we should all go and have a look at them.

House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) (Abolition of By-Elections) Bill [HL]

Lord Lilley Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 3rd December 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, on putting forward this Bill; if anyone could by his wit, eloquence and the respect in which I hold him convince me of its necessity, it would be him.

I want to make a few brief points. I shall comment on the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, that we should widen the debate to the question of robes. I remember that, when I first wore my robes here on my introduction, I was told the story of Lord Hailsham who, having worn them at the Queen’s Speech, went out and saw the then Neil Kinnock on the other side of Central Lobby, which was filled with Japanese tourists. He shouted “Neil!”, at which point all the Japanese tourists fell to their knees—so there are clearly risks involved in the wearing of robes.

To get back to the more serious issue of today, first, the by-elections were part of an agreement. I remember that because, at the time, I was deputy leader of the Conservative Party and the then William Hague phoned me up to say that Lord Cranborne, who was a member of the shadow Cabinet, had, behind his back, negotiated with Tony Blair an agreement on the reform of the upper House, and to ask what we should do about it. I agreed with him that we had to sack Lord Cranborne, and we marched to this place and confronted the Association of Conservative Peers, who, to a man and woman—or to a noble Lord and noble Baroness—supported Lord Cranborne in what he was doing. It was not a welcome agreement, but it was an agreement that was subsequently enshrined in law in this place.

I have listened time and again in recent months to lectures from noble Lords, some of whom have spoken today, on the importance of keeping agreements once you have signed them in the context of the Northern Ireland protocol. You may not like the agreement and you may not agree with the people who negotiated the agreement, but you are bound by the agreement. It may, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, be described by one of the negotiators as “bullshit”, or the threats he used may be “bullshit”. We know now that Monsieur Barnier’s position was based on pretence and he subsequently turned out to be sovereignist in French terms—although that did not do him much good. Whatever it is, we are either bound by agreements or we are not. We are able to repudiate agreements only if the other side is not implementing them in good faith or there is a substantial and significant change of circumstances.

[Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)]

My Lords, I want to raise the issue of the agreement because I am one of the few people who have been appointed by the independent Appointments Commission. Since 1999, the numbers have radically reduced, and part of the agreement was that there would be regular independent appointments, yet by-elections for hereditary Peers have continued as part of what I believe is the same agreement. I wonder whether the noble Lord would like to comment on that.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

The noble Baroness makes a point which I had not previously considered. If the agreement is being breached in that respect, it is an important matter and I would agree with her that it should be properly adhered to. I am glad to have her support on the importance of adhering to agreements, which should apply also to hereditary by-elections.

My second point is this. What approach should we adopt to constitutional reform? There are broadly two approaches: one, which normally prevails particularly on those Benches but among some on this side of the House, is what Hayek calls the constructivist approach—the belief that any measure should be evaluated against some abstract principle, such as democracy, equality or diversity, and that if it does not conform to them, it should be radically changed until it does. If we apply that to this place, the only way to achieve representative diversity would be the jury principle, and all of us would have to go unless our number happened to be picked in a random choice of people to replace us. Certainly, if democracy is to prevail, we would have to move to an elected House—something which I think would be foolish and of which the lower House would not approve. The alternative approach is the pragmatic approach that tends to prevail on these Benches. Does it work in practice? I submit that this House does work in practice. It works in practice for the contribution from the hereditaries—that does not prevent it working in practice. If things work in practice, we should not try to mend that which is not broken. The view of the constructivists, of course, is that it may work in practice but it does not work in principle—a foolish attitude if ever there was one, and one which I would not advocate.

Finally, does the House of Lords as it is composed and with a hereditary component work in practice? When I was Secretary of State, I would always have a Minister in my team in the Lords. The Whips would present me with various names and I would look through their qualifications, experience and so on and choose one. As it happened, most times I chose a hereditary. I did not know whether they were hereditaries or life Peers—I am afraid I was not acquainted with many Members of this House at that stage. I chose them on the basis of their experience and what I knew of their abilities, and there was a disproportionate number of them among the hereditaries Peers, who, for one reason or another—perhaps because they had known from birth that they would one day, if their father died before they did and their elder brothers predeceased them and so on, come to this place—had prepared for this by taking an interest in public affairs, but not driven purely by the sort of ambition that drove me and others who have come through the more disreputable process of going through the lower House.

We should recognise that hereditary by-elections are a valuable source of experienced, committed, prepared men and women—it would be nice if there were more women, and that is one of the more powerful arguments that the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has used.

I remind the House that we made an agreement, and we should abide by that agreement. If we do not abide by that agreement, we are opening up to not abiding by other agreements, and I shall remember that when debates take place on the Northern Ireland protocol. We can either say that abstract principles apply, in which case this whole place has to be radically transformed, or we can say that we will go with what works and stick with what works, and not waste our time and unnecessarily change it.

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

If the noble Lord is so convinced by the principle that agreements, once made, are binding and can never be changed, should he not then accept that the European Communities Act 1972 was a binding agreement in which we joined the European Union which could therefore never be changed by a future Parliament?

[Lord Lilley]

With respect, that is a silly point because we left under the treaty of whatever it is, which had Article 50 which allowed members states to leave.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I withdrew my name from this debate yesterday because I was told that it was likely to go on well after 1.30 pm, and I have to be up in Saltaire by 5.30 pm. It takes those of us who live outside the south-east longer to get home. I congratulate all those who have spoken on the self-discipline and brevity of their interventions, and I am therefore happy to speak briefly on this.

I joined the pre-reform House and I recall the Cranborne agreement directly because, as it happened, my wife and I were in the back of Lord Ashdown’s car, as his wife drove us to a dinner in Windsor. We were listening in to the negotiations that he was having with the Government about what Lord Cranborne had offered. I can confirm that this was clearly intended to be temporary—the pebble in the shoe, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, rightly said. The question is: when do we take the next stage of partial reform, and what should it be? I welcome the comment from the noble Earl, Lord Attlee, that there should be not just this Bill but also a statutory appointments committee. That is the least of the steps that we could next take.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

Who would select the people on this statutory appointments committee? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

That is a question of public appointment, as we know, and there is some controversy about public appointments—but we have approaches to them. Making the committee on public appointments also a statutory body is perhaps also something that we need to do when we have a Prime Minister who is not, in the terms of the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, a “good chap”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

I am not sure that I understood that intervention. I have read most of Alastair Campbell’s memoirs—but I can tell the noble Lord what was going on in Downing Street in 1999, because I was working there. We were certainly worried to death about the whole of that legislative programme. Our clear manifesto commitment was to remove all the hereditaries, and we were prevented from doing that because we were told that the rest of the programme would be wrecked. If there are any noble Lords who have not picked up on that and understood it, will they please read it again in Hansard, or read the comments that the Marquess of Salisbury has made? Do us all a favour, please, and when or if we have this debate next year—if it fails this year, I shall bring it back, and that is not a threat but a promise—let us end the discussion about that. It is simply false, incorrect, wrong and absurd. I hope that I have made myself clear.

The other point that needs repeating, even though several—

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. My understanding was that at the time, if he wished to, the Prime Minister could have created enough Peers to get his legislation through.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

I can only assume from that that the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, would have been in favour of a Prime Minister, with a clear manifesto promise and a huge majority in the Commons, creating 700 or 800 Peers in order to get his legislation through the Lords. He talks about respecting tradition and not upsetting the apple cart too much, but that is an outrageous suggestion and I think he knows it.

Imports from EU to UK: Grace Period

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, obviously there is a distinction in how we manage goods imported from the rest of the world compared to those from the European Union. That is consistent with WTO law and is obviously dependent on the special circumstances of us leaving the customs union and the single market. It is our intention, of course, to have a single set of world-class rules by 2025—if possible, earlier—for all goods that will give us the best border in the world. The decisions that we have taken on import controls are consistent with that and on that trajectory.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

I welcome my noble friend’s decision to prolong the grace periods, for the reasons that my noble friend Lord Moylan spelled out earlier, but will he confirm that experience of grace periods in Northern Ireland shows the wisdom of what he is doing: that refraining from introducing the additional controls that the EU wanted us to impose on trade between Great Britain and Northern Ireland has not resulted in a flow of goods into the EU across the Irish border or undermined EU standards in any way, and that the only reason the EU is persisting in wanting us to apply those controls is to punish us and the people of Northern Ireland for Brexit?

[Lord Frost (Con)]

Of course, I agree very much with the thrust of my noble friend’s question. We believe that in the decisions we have taken, both in the context of the protocol and on trade more broadly, we are showing pragmatism in the way we are managing our borders, with a due focus on the real levels of risk involved. We hope that the European Union will do the same in the context of Northern Ireland and allow us to put in place arrangements, as set out in our Command Paper, that are consistent with those levels of risk.

Brexit Opportunities

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Thursday 16th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, there is a complex list of proposals, consultations, ideas for legislation, specific plans for legislation, and so on, so it is hard to generalise. However, I wish to be clear that we intend to pursue all this urgently. That is why it is my responsibility as a Cabinet Minister to make this happen, over and above the departmental responsibilities that other Secretaries of State have. We certainly intend to pursue the review of EU law extremely urgently so that we can deliver results and make a difference rapidly.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome my noble friend’s Statement and, like him, I welcome the call from the Labour Front Bench for even more ambitious deregulation. It is healthy that there should be this competition between the two sides to improve and update our legislation, which we had no opportunity to do when we were in the European Union. I suggest that the way to move forward now, on top of the excellent TIGGR report, is to go back to the original briefs that Ministers were given when these directives were being negotiated. Invariably, they said, “Minister, we don’t really want this, but the best thing to do is to try to get it amended a bit here and a bit there”—and, if possible, a bit more than we actually got. If nothing else, there would be a guide to changes we can make just by going back to those briefs.

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I very much welcome that suggestion from my noble friend. It is an extremely good one and a reminder that in many cases, Governments of both parties opposed proposals that have now become law and to which we are supposed to reconcile ourselves. I will certainly take that up and see what we can find—within the limits of Civil Service record-keeping capacity, which may impose some limits on what we are able to do.

Northern Ireland Protocol

Lord Lilley Excerpts

Wednesday 21st July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, there are plenty of deadlines in this process already; I do not want to add to them by generating others. We have proposed a standstill—and I will write shortly to the Commission proposing this. Obviously, if a standstill can be agreed, it will take away some of the significance of the expiry of the current grace period. I very much hope we will be able to do that. Obviously, if we cannot, the 30 September deadline is not very far away. We do not want to be faced with the same situation that we have been faced with before on chilled meats and have to focus on solving the cliff-edge problem, rather than dealing with the fundamental underlying problems.

[Lord Lilley (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome my noble friend’s practical and forward-looking proposals and deplore the backward-looking point-scoring of both Opposition Front Benches. Can my noble friend confirm that, although the EU and its apologists in this House claim that the protocol requires rigid application of all EU rules and checks on goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain, in fact, Article 6 says that the Joint Committee shall adopt “appropriate recommendations” to avoid controls at the ports and airports in Northern Ireland “to the extent possible”? So, if the EU refuses to respond positively to his proposals, it will be in breach of both the letter and spirit of the protocol.

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My noble friend as always makes a very good point. The issue of the requirements in Article 5 and the requirement in Article 6 to avoid checks and controls is of course one of the areas where you cannot just read the protocol straight; you have to look at the purpose and the way its different provisions interact. It is certainly arguable that the Article 6 commitments are not being delivered on, but we have not so far sought to argue that, because the protocol is a political and purposive document and we believe that the right way to solve the problems arising is in a political way, rather than immediately reaching for legal arguments and processes.