Autumn Budget 2024

Lord Oates Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as chief executive of United Against Malnutrition and Hunger. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Booth-Smith, on his excellent maiden speech. I acknowledge the terrible fiscal legacy that was inherited by the new Government and the need to increase revenue, but I had hoped that the first Labour Budget in 14 years would be one that delivered sustainable development at home and reinvigorated our commitment to sustainable development overseas.

At home, the decision to hike employers’ national insurance contributions is one of the worst tax choices that could have been made. It will, as we have heard, cost jobs, reduce pay growth and impact care and GP services. Alongside that, there is one other thing I shall highlight: the hiking of the bus fare cap while fuel duty remains frozen. That is a deeply regressive move and is also counter to the Government’s climate agenda. If we want growth, we need not only better targeted tax rises, as my noble friend Lord Fox argued—and I commend in particular his call for increased taxes on the gambling industry that is spreading misery through our communities—but, beyond that, we need to overhaul our regulatory and bureaucratic systems.

In the Budget, the Chancellor referred to the importance of life sciences to our economy, but, while public investment in the Life Sciences Innovative Manufacturing Fund may be welcome, it will not do much good if the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency remains swamped and its processes remain slow and expensive, leading UK firms to look to jurisdictions overseas. Equally, the increased R&D funding announced in the Budget is welcome, but it will not do much good if the system cannot deliver. Just last week, I was speaking with a leader of one of our medical diagnostic companies, who told me that applications for HMRC R&D tax credits used to be processed in six to eight weeks, but he was still waiting after 14 months for a determination. Businesses are going bust waiting. If we cannot get these basics right, we will not deliver sustainable development at home.

As to our commitment to sustainable development abroad, I share the profound disappointment of the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, at this Budget and the further cuts to the aid budget that result, coming on top of the drastic cuts under the previous Government, in breach of their clear manifesto commitment. One does not need to be an international affairs expert to recognise that need around the world is greater than ever, with rising levels of hunger and malnutrition, multiple crises and climate change bringing more misery to millions. As the Save the Children Fund has noted, the change to the debt rules in the Chancellor’s new fiscal framework have not been matched by a change in the fiscal tests that were set to return to our legal—and, I would say, moral—obligation to get back to our 0.7% commitment. This means that those tests are basically unmeetable, so the Government have effectively abandoned that 0.7% commitment.

This will not only diminish our international standing and impact millions of people around the world but is deeply harmful to our self-interest. The International Rescue Committee notes that 680,000 refugees have fled Sudan for Chad since April 2023, yet the humanitarian response plan for eastern Chad is just 27% funded. With tensions rising due to resource competition, refugees are on the move. Some are already in the camps around Calais and some will almost inevitably end up in the UK, at a cost to the Exchequer far higher than if they could have stayed where they were, close to their home country and able to return when, God willing, peace is restored. This is not the only short-term decision-making. Conflict prevention and stabilisation, as the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, also recognised, was cut under the previous Government and needs to be restored.

In conclusion, the Minister told us that this was a Budget of choices. On employment taxes and the aid budget, they have made the wrong choices.

Road Pricing

Lord Oates Excerpts

Monday 29th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

I recognise what the noble Lord says. Many think tanks and other groups have done a lot of work on road pricing. Jurisdictions around the world are looking at it; however, as yet, very few have managed to introduce it successfully. From the Treasury’s perspective, we welcome work from external stakeholders on road pricing and all other taxes.

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, the Minister has done good job of telling us what the Government are against but a less good job of telling us what they are in favour of. In light of the reduction in fuel duty revenues that will arise from the UK’s ambitions to shift to electric vehicles, can she tell us what concrete plans the Treasury has to replace those losses in a way that is positive for the environment and fair to rural communities?

[Baroness Vere of Norbiton (Con)]

At the moment, fuel duty raises around £25 billion annually. That is forecast to increase in nominal terms to £30.5 billion over the scorecard period to 2029. The change in fuel duty is a medium-term to long-term problem which will allow everybody who has an interest in this to have their say—including taking into account the shift to electric vehicles—and an appropriate solution will be found.

International Women’s Day

Lord Oates Excerpts

Friday 8th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson, and I fully associate myself with her comments on the horrors inflicted on women by Hamas and the suffering of women in Gaza and in conflicts around the world. I declare my interests as chief executive of United Against Malnutrition and Hunger and as a trustee of the Royal African Society. I am reluctant to add to the pressure of expectations on the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, but I cannot help the fact that I too am looking forward to her speech. Her contribution to public policy improvements has been extraordinary.

It is a privilege to take part in this debate, which marks the 123rd International Women’s Day, I believe. It is a particularly poignant day for me, as it was on International Women’s Day six years ago that my mother died from pancreatic cancer. Many in your Lordships’ House will know Jenny Joseph’s poem which starts:

“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple”.


My mother embodied the spirit and fun of that poem and, although she was a conservative dresser for most of her life, in her 80th year she added a purple streak to her hair and took to wearing purple outfits. However, her purple phase was not, in fact, a homage to the poem but because, as president of the Richmond upon Thames branch of Rotary International, she was a passionate advocate of its campaign for the eradication of polio worldwide, symbolised by a purple ribbon. The unlikely streak of purple in her hair was designed to lure people into a conversation in which she could then advocate forcefully for them to support polio eradication. Possibly, the purple streak was also designed to provoke eye-rolling bemusement from my father, which my mum naturally delighted in. My mother was, as so many mothers are, an inspiration and an anchor all my life, but her contribution went far beyond her family, although she did the bulk of the caring there. She was a schoolteacher, an inveterate organiser and a charity fundraiser.

Today, 123 years after the first International Women’s Day was celebrated in 1911, while there has been much progress towards greater economic inclusion of women, there is still a long way to go, both at home and abroad. In many parts of the world, women continue to face overt persecution and exclusion from the economy, from education and from wide aspects of society. Discrimination in access to health services and basic resources such as food remains commonplace, and the burden of disease falls most heavily on women in many countries.

As the APPG on Malaria and Neglected Tropical Diseases has noted, women and girls are disproportionately affected by malaria and NTDs, due to social, economic, biological and cultural factors. These affect women and girls both as patients and caregivers, disrupting their health and keeping them out of school and work, exacerbating existing gender inequalities. Girls are often more likely to be taken out of school to take care of children and family members. Lack of access to clean water and sanitation increases exposure and the risk of developing NTDs for women who bear responsibility for water collection, home and family care. Limited financial resources, time constraints, diminished autonomy, stigma and discrimination create barriers that prevent women accessing timely healthcare, education and employment opportunities.

Through close contact with children, women are two to four times more likely to develop trachoma and are blinded up to four times more often than men. Since women and girls perform two-thirds of water collection globally, they have a higher risk of developing schistosomiasis in endemic areas, an NTD caused by freshwater parasitic worms. Certain NTDs, such as schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminths, can directly affect women’s reproductive health and increase the risk of adverse outcomes during pregnancy, including anaemia, premature birth, increased blood loss during childbirth, infertility and a significantly higher risk of HIV. One in three pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa is infected with hookworm, which, in some settings, is responsible for 54% of anaemia cases during pregnancy. Anaemia accounts for at least 20% of maternal deaths.

The economic impacts of NTDs are devastating, constraining productivity and prosperity in so many countries. A recent study by Deloitte showed that if Nigeria met its NTD elimination targets by 2030, it could add $19 billion to its economy. Modelling from the Economist Intelligence Unit showed that by eliminating two NTDs—soil-transmitted helminths and schistosomiasis—Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Zimbabwe would collectively add over $5.1 billion to their GDPs by 2040.

It is not just disease that holds back women’s economic inclusion; there is a huge gender gap in access to food. Some years ago, when I was working on a project in Sudan, we heard repeatedly from women demanding a new dispensation that would end the reality that women and girls frequently ate last and least, and that was before the horrific civil war which has plunged so many further into misery and starvation. As my noble friend Lady Northover said in her excellent speech, we have to return to the previous cross-party commitment to spend 0.7% of GNI on international aid, and we should ensure that we spend the aid budget to maximum effect by investing in the foundation stones of women’s economic inclusion: access to good-quality education, access to the nutrition needed to develop healthy and productive lives, and access to health services that can treat and prevent disease.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Oates Excerpts

Wednesday 25th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in congratulating the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle on her compelling maiden speech. We are debating the economic elements of the gracious Speech at a time when millions of people in western democracies are concluding that the current economic settlement no longer works for them, and that mainstream politics offers no answers to the unsettling economic changes they are grappling with. This gracious Speech will only confirm their lack of faith. It fails to acknowledge, much less to tackle, the profound challenges to our economy. Corporate executives continue to gain super-rewards for inadequate performance, while real average wages are stagnating and traditional modes of employment are disintegrating. Productivity remains stubbornly resistant to improvement. Our public services are suffering under the strain of six years of austerity. Our banking system remains unfit for purpose, as the noble Lord, Lord McFall, so eloquently set out. If that were not enough, the Conservative Party has decided that this is the moment to gamble Britain’s economic future in an EU referendum.

Rarely have a Prime Minister and Chancellor so nakedly placed their political interests ahead of the interests of their country and the jobs and living standards of millions of their fellow citizens. For whatever the result of this referendum, Britain is already paying the price in slowing economic growth and deteriorating public finances as a result of investments frozen and spending put on hold. That matters because it means jobs not created, pay rises deferred and real lives made harder. God willing, we will not compound this folly with the profound economic shock that would follow exit from the European Union. Whatever the outcome, we will still have to face two major challenges—how we provide an economic framework that can serve the needs of the British people in an era of exponential technological change, and how we can ensure that the benefits of this new economy are spread fairly and do not continue to accumulate in super-rewards for the few and super-economic insecurity for the many.

Between 2008 and 2015, real wages fell in Britain by more than 10%. That is the longest decline since the middle of the 19th century, and wages for the majority have barely risen since. On top of stagnant wages, workers have seen other benefits such as pension entitlements curtailed or withdrawn. An Uber economy is increasingly developing, where workers are expected to employ themselves, with no entitlement to sick pay or holidays, while corporates enrich themselves at the expense of a workforce for which they refuse to accept any responsibility. While employment insecurity grows and average wages have declined, the gap between average wages and the remuneration of top executives has widened every year.

No believer in a market economy should object to people being paid well for doing demanding jobs. But let us be clear. If someone employed by a public company is taking home annual rewards of £10 million, £20 million or more, as some British bosses are doing, that is not fair reward for a tough job—it is publicly acknowledged, politically accepted and legalised embezzlement. It would be one thing if these top executives were delivering extraordinary results for their companies, but most are not. Research conducted by academics at the University of Cambridge and the University of Utah indicates that CEO pay is in fact negatively related to future share price performance. It found that firms that pay their CEOs in the top 10% of excess pay see abnormal negative returns over the next three years, of approximately minus 8%. Overconfidence arising from being overpaid, the research finds, makes for bad decisions and poor outcomes for shareholders. Why have we tolerated this situation where a small minority of people reward themselves so absurdly? What motivates such absurd levels of greed and what callousness allows top executives to accept such inflated rewards, while holding down the wages of their fellow employees, to the extent that research from the high pay unit shows that chief executive pay is now 183 times greater than that that of average employees?

The public rightly feel profoundly let down by the response of mainstream political parties. Between us we have acquiesced in economic outcomes that have profoundly distorted the market economy; we have allowed risk to be shifted from super-rewarded risk-takers on to the shoulders of ordinary taxpayers; we have allowed public companies to be pilfered by their top executives and corporate taxation to become an optional extra for the wealthiest corporations in the world; and we have not even begun to recognise, let alone prepare for, the profound changes that are coming in the economy. The Government should address themselves to these issues in the gracious Speech. They should craft a new economic settlement which celebrates and rewards effort and innovation but spreads the rewards fairly. They should propose a policy framework to provide security in the new employment environment in which people increasingly operate. They should tackle the threat to our economy from a still unfit banking system. They should reform the curriculum to ensure that every child, no matter their background, has the skills to benefit from an increasingly digital economy. But they have done none of that. They are too busy repeating the tired-out mantra of the “long-term economic plan” to have noticed that they have no coherent economic plan at all.

There are very direct political consequences to this failure of mainstream politicians to tackle the real economic challenges that people face. Those consequences can be seen in the rise of the bombastic politics and beggar-my-neighbour economics of Donald Trump and the sinister success of nationalist parties right across Europe. If we are to avoid such outcomes in the UK, we have to address ourselves with much greater urgency to crafting a new economic settlement that will serve the interests of the many, not the avarice of the few. If we do not, before long we will have to face a new and unwelcome political settlement instead.