Queen’s Speech

Lord Patten Excerpts

Wednesday 25th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

My Lords, I strongly support the gracious Speech and the two Bills that provide the focus for me tonight, the modern transport Bill and the neighbourhood planning and infrastructure Bill, as well as the links between them and the environmental issues that they both raise. It is good to see the forward-looking policies in the modern transport Bill, with everything from Cornish space stations to driverless cars. The latter are sure to spawn a huge new raft of debate about where responsibilities lie, in particular for accidents. I am sure my learned friends are up to the job of helping us on that as this interesting new line of business comes along for them. The legal minefield we are entering is obvious. Who will be held responsible—the operator or the driver long range, the owner or the designer? It is clear that machines are unlikely to be summoned in courts, although I think that eventually there will be fewer machine than human errors on our roads.

So good luck to the Department for Transport with its futurology, which I support strongly. However, I trust it will not mind if I raise also the fact that the very phrase “modern transport Bill” may ring hollow to some users of, for example, mainline trains into stations such as Waterloo from 100 miles or more around who, in the 2010s, travel still some part of the time on single-line tracks, as is the case for much of the journey from Exeter up through Yeovil as far as Salisbury on the way to London. For people who travel that way, this is a thoroughly unmodern experience, with all the delays and pauses at passing loops as though in some developing country as people go to and fro what is rapidly becoming a self-generated south-western technological and growing powerhouse—all of its own endeavours, with little direct help. I applaud what is happening in the south-west.

I know how much store the Government rightly set by infrastructure and I applaud their plans to put the National Infrastructure Commission on a statutory footing in the related neighbourhood planning and infrastructure Bill. In the meantime, always looking for fresh information, I innocently asked how many stretches of such single-line track into mainline stations there are within 120 miles of London. I was told in a Written Answer on 11 May that this information was not available. Indeed, it was a matter not for HMG but for Network Rail. That struck me as a bit peculiar. Is not mainline rail part of the critical national infrastructure? Is it not vital for national resilience and thus of great concern to HMG? Does the Department for Transport not have this stuff in its records? If not, the new National Infrastructure Commission will have to start from scratch and work anew on some Domesday Book of essential infrastructure information. For how long will the Government tolerate such thoroughly unmodern parts of infrastructure as single-line railway tracks in our present century?

Secondly, I also support the need to build new housing as part of our critical modern social and economic infrastructure, supporting as I do the drive to build more, even though it saddens us all to see even grade 4 agricultural land taken out of use and built on. I recognise that sometimes that simply must happen. The Government—local government in particular—must also recognise that once land is built on, that is an irrevocable change. Once the first turf is cut or the first tree or hedgerow cut down to expedite, say, an edge of town or village development, large or small, that is an irrevocable landscape step with no turning back. It is critical that the Government take a lead in encouraging and persuading councils to do all that they can to make such new housebuilding more acceptable to locals, as much in the interests of the incoming new occupiers as the maybe disappointed nimbys who do not much want to see the development in the first place.

Too often, it seems that local councils are satisfied that they have done their bit by their local responsibilities in extracting from housing developers chunks of money for road improvement, a new school or a better health centre. They say, “Look what we delivered”, without giving anything like adequate attention to planning for and enforcement of the low-cost environmental enhancements that make new housing developments all the more acceptable. There is the planting of deep shelterbelts with trees and hedging that make an impact in years, not decades, to soften the often raw edges of new housing developments, as well as helping to reduce flood risk through diminishing run-off, as tree-planting does. There is the use of the best possible road sound- deadening materials or, just like noise-proofing, night sky protection by getting the best possible low-reflective lighting installed. These are low-cost ways of ensuring the growing acceptability of new development and they are vital for getting such new development to happen.

This a matter of encouragement and of setting the framework. I welcome the gracious Speech in particular because it does not make that traditional government or politician’s mistake in the past of saying, in verbiage, that they can create things and make things happen. All Governments can do is create frameworks in which individuals and people can economically and socially flourish. That is why I disagree strongly with the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, in her opening speech. She clearly wanted a gracious Speech rammed full of telling people what to do. That is not something that this Government ever wish to do.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Patten Excerpts

Monday 13th May 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten]

My Lords, I warmly congratulate my noble friend Lord Glasgow on what he has just said about high-speed rail, and not only on what he said but on the way that he said it, which was lucid and clear, so unlike many speeches that the political classes tend to unleash on the innocent electorate. They say all that stuff about how we are about to be nudged by the nudge unit, the need for a national conversation—what is a national conversation?—about this, that or the other and the need for us all to go out into the street and celebrate something as stakeholders, probably slipping into a paradigm shift as we do so. I greatly regret the way in which the political classes tend to address themselves and not the electorate, thus widening the gap between the two. The next thing that we will be told is that we need a political narrative about HS2. What is a political narrative? I cannot tell the difference between a political narrative and the back end of a number 11 bus.

I say this respectfully, but in the gracious Speech we have another prime example of meaningless guff, drafted for Her Majesty about a policy that I happen to support very strongly, saying that it is to be “world-class”—that dread phrase that public relations experts wheel out in company reports. I regret that the gracious Speech had those words for Her Majesty.

In the three areas that I intend to address, which are the economy, housing and transport and HS2—I regret to say that my noble friend has largely shot my fox, so the third section will be short—I wish to talk about the need for clarity and, above all else, for honesty, because if we are honest we will get a proper payback from the electorate.

I turn first to the realities of the economic situation that we are in. I am a strong supporter of our policy on deficit reduction. Doubtless the Treasury is pleased to hear that. There may not be all that many of us left, but those of us who are mostly think that the naysayers to our policy can “IMF off”.

I think the electorate will accept what is being done to achieve this deficit reduction if it is explained in an open and transparent way, so we should explain to our electorate that the UK’s debt, just as in the aftermath of World War 2, has ballooned to a level that will never be paid off by economic growth alone, probably in our lifetimes. Therefore, not wanting, at one extreme, to default our way out of the debt problems that face us or, at the other end, to impose impossible levels of austerity, what we are doing is very sensible. It is reducing the real value of debt by keeping interest rates below inflation. After 1945, this policy of negative real interest rates, sustained for many years—indeed into the 1970s—was a bipartisan and very effective approach to reducing the debt pile, with savers then as savers now being asked slowly to absorb the pain. They were a captive audience buying government debt at below market interest rates. That is certainly happening today with inflation fast approaching 3%.

Against the background of a more or less flatlining economy likely to obtain for some while—a long period of low growth—there is nowhere else for us to go. The banks already know, with greater regulation, which I again support, concerning demands on them to hold more capital, that the Government know that there is a set of captive buyers for their debt out there. I am not quite so sure that the rank and file of retail savers have woken up to the fact that government policy is indeed to erode the real value of their capital in order to reduce the country’s debt. This is a highly inconvenient truth, but truth it is, and both parties have conspired to cover up that truth in earlier years. It is better explained than not, better understood than glossed over. We should be honest.

Incidentally, there are those who want to persecute entirely innocent baby boomers for having had it too good over the years and force them to make recompense by passing some of their wealth down to generations X and Y. We should recognise that this blameless group is already doing quite a lot of that by taking part in the process that I have just outlined. Also, from January 2014, we will see more such transfers between the generations as the help to buy scheme, following the new buy scheme and then the fresh buy scheme, begins to be rolled out, paid for in part by savers and taxpayers, many of them in the baby boomer generation.

My second point is that, needless to say, I hope, I support anything that will enable more people to buy their own homes in a proper and orderly way. I also support anything that helps the building industry because it employs people and gets more jobs created more quickly. I also support anything that enhances the environment. However, there are three risks involved. First, there is the risk that under the new scheme, from some date in January 2014 onwards, people who should not be borrowing money may be brought into borrowing it and, as in the run-up to 2007, we may have a higher risk of people taking on debts that they should not be taking on. At no point in the excellent speech by my noble friend Lord Deighton that introduced this debate did I hear any assessment of the risk of this or, indeed, of the parallel risk that the scheme may incite house price inflation again in a way that we have not seen in recent years.

I am told that my noble friend was an investment banker in the old days. Doubtless he was pretty used to assessing risk and to mitigating it. I do not know whether he took a few risks as a young banker, but I do not wish to take risks with taxpayers’ funds that may leave more people in debt who should not be in debt and lead to house price inflation coming back again. If my noble friend Lady Hanham, who always speaks very clearly and never uses jargon, any more than my noble friend Lord Glasgow does, is tempted to say in her wind-up speech—if she chooses to address the point that I am making—that there is no risk at all in those schemes, I promise her I shall not barrack from my spot high up on the Back Benches by shouting “Bunkum!”, but I shall certainly be thinking it very fiercely. It is terribly important that we stress that risks are being introduced in this new housing policy.

The third risk, of course, is that it will lead to more rapid development on greenfield sites. I support housebuilding on greenfield sites. I prefer it to be on brownfield sites, but I support it because it is necessary and the only way that we can provide houses and flats for those with the ability to buy them.

However, I hear disturbing stories about the landscape effect and the quality of new buildings on greenfield sites being rolled out by housebuilding companies. I therefore took an interest this weekend and went to look at a housing scheme being run by Bovis Homes, a publicly listed company, on the edge of Wincanton, a small market town in the boondocks of Somerset. I found what I saw there disturbing. Much of the pre-existing landscaping that had been demanded by the local Liberal Democrat-controlled council had been eaten into, tree shelterbelts interfered with and taken into part of the development sites, and hedges planted by Messrs Bovis now ripped up and replaced by metal- grilled fencing, giving a terrible look to the development itself. It is just the kind of thing that discourages those who might be tempted to support, as I do, the building of high-quality houses on greenfield sites and gives it a bad name.

Incidentally, if it were not so sad it would be funny also to be told that in one or two of the new houses, which have been on sale only for about six months, there are the sort of issues that none of us who wish to promote the welfare of the housebuilding industry wish to see. One poor lady putting her three-pin plug into a socket in the wall found that it would not power up her appliances, so she asked an electrician to come; I have checked these facts, and they are facts. When the electrician came, he—for it was a male electrician—found that there was indeed no electrical supply of any sort running up the walls to the sockets. My noble friend Lady Hanham needs to do all she can to encourage local government to be strict on the maintenance of landscaping around greenfield site new buildings, and all she can to encourage the building industry to be right first time, just as we hope all manufacturers will be right first time.

Thirdly and lastly, I turn to infrastructure. Just as bad housing developments can be a blot on the landscape, as my noble friend Lord Glasgow said, we undoubtedly face blots on the landscape from the development of HS2. There is no point in messing about and saying that they are not there. We should be absolutely honest and say that HS2 will be damaging to some parts of the environment, at least for a while, through noise and the destruction of landscape and views. It is therefore absolutely right that we must persuade people to accept HS2 in its various manifestations as something that we will be prepared to pay large sums of compensation for in order to make it bearable for people who live nearby. I hope that we will say transparently that we recognise the environmental risk and intend to do something about it, including, maybe, the introduction of environmental offsets of one sort or another.

That sort of transparency is also vital for those who wish to come alongside the Government. My noble friend Lord Deighton wishes to attract investment from abroad, which I entirely support. Only last week, we had one of the big Canadian pension funds, the Ontario teachers’ pension fund, saying that it felt that too many schemes were seeking public funding from entities like it, and that it was important that we reduced the number of schemes and concentrated on those that were deliverable—and, as my noble friend Lord Glasgow said, get going on it very quickly.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Patten Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten]

My Lords, certainly in my part of the south-western dairying country, what the right reverend Prelate has just said will go down very well—“Bishop calls for speedy badger cull”. They will like that very much in my part of Somerset.

In declaring my current business and financial interests, I wish to concentrate on four paragraphs only in the gracious Speech: paragraph 2 on the deficit; paragraphs 3 and 7 together on regulation; and, finally, the last paragraph, which prefigures other measures that might be laid before your Lordships’ House.

Turning, first, to the deficit in paragraph 2, I strongly support the Government’s policies. That is a rather unfashionable position to take in the debate this afternoon in the face of the newly fashionable anti-austerity, pro-growth-at-any-cost consensus that seems to be sweeping across Europe and its political community. So far as concerns the deficit, I believe that we must stay the course. We have not yet really begun to deal with the effects of cutting Labour’s increase in public expenditure of more than a half in real terms when it was in office. To start swerving before the rubber has even begun to hit the road would be a self-inflicted political, as well as economic, act, waving goodbye to our AAA rating and saying hello and welcome to the bond market barbarians who are at our gates at the moment watching for the first sign of exactly this sort of capitulation by the United Kingdom.

If we need our deficit-reducing backbone stiffening, we need look no further than France, where meeting the deficit target of 3% of GDP by the end of 2013 is going to demand an extra €24 billion or €25 billion in terms of changes to be found via expenditure cuts and/or tax increases. I am afraid that even in France there are not enough bankers’ bonuses to go round to meet that sum. Therefore, we need to look to our own devices in our own businesses to help with faster deficit reduction and to help to fight our way out of the current double-dip recession. One of those ways is through regulatory reform. Often this can be done through a set of minor measures but they lead to great help for our businesses.

That leads me to paragraphs 3 and 7 in the gracious Speech. I know that the coalition realises that businesses, both large and small, are its friends—or should be—for they have in place much to help us grow again. Many corporates have healthy balance sheets, healthy cash piles and considerable confidence in their own businesses —at least, the businesses that they run. They work hard, as Ministers do. I sometimes worry that both business men and women and Ministers work too hard over too long hours and do not leave themselves enough thinking time. At the same time, those in the business world welcome the encouragement that coalition Ministers give them through, for example, leading export promotion delegations abroad, when Ministers and businesses work very hard together. It is just that at the moment those same businesspeople do not necessarily feel confident enough to pull the investment trigger, particularly those with exposure to Europe and the problems faced there, and particularly also those faced with recession at home and what some would argue is a sclerotic banking lending system, with a shrinking money supply and so on, to which little list businesses would add regulation.

Therefore, on the plus side of the measures in paragraphs 3 and 7 in the gracious Speech are the excellent proposals to overhaul employment tribunals here, as well as repealing some unnecessary regulations there. That is good. On the minus side are some potentially burdensome new rules, such as rights to flexible employment, extending time off via shared parental leave and so on. There is no doubt that this is great news for the beneficiaries but it is less great news for employers, as it will put heavier burdens on job creators.

Just as my hard-working and incisive right honourable friend Mr Francis Maude is busy reducing the number of quangos, lo and behold up pops in paragraph 7 of the gracious Speech the man or woman who is to be the groceries code adjudicator—something that I would certainly recognise as a quango. I do not know whether your Lordships have all received one of these but the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills favoured at least some people, and certainly me, by kindly sending an illustrated booklet about this new quango. The centrefold contains a quite lurid close-up picture, without any explanation of why it is there, of that very staple of the lunchboxes of working Britons—the imported and very expensive fennel bulb. There is no mention of why the fennel bulb is picked on in this document. We may learn later from the Minister about our Government’s fennel policies. The only thing that is mentioned is that the adjudicator will be protecting suppliers abroad, as well as at home, so there will doubtless be dancing in the fennel-producing fields of Mediterranean Europe tonight when they know that this adjudicator is going to look after their needs.

Do all these measures taken together—a bit less regulation here, more regulation there—equal a carefully balanced package, as I would like to think, or is there some self-contradiction, as I rather suspect? Whatever the answer, the instinct to regulate is still deeply embedded in our governmental genes. Ministers for deregulation are soon outfoxed. Deregulation tsars come and go, make speeches at party conferences and platforms, both parties calling for this and that, and are strangled shortly afterwards. Rising civil servants know that to swim against the regulatory tide is not to guarantee a clear path to becoming a Permanent Secretary. Therefore, I am concerned that we are continuing to have difficulty in getting a balanced approach to regulation.

I turn to the last paragraph of the gracious Speech, which prefigures, through a legislative glass darkly, what might come in due course in terms of new legislation in this Session. Emerging through the legislative gloom, I would still like to see sensible economic measures to promote non-inflationary and non-bond market disturbing growth; for example, measures to bring forward legislation to enable High Speed 2 to be built soonest in the interests of easing our sclerotic land transport system—it is going to happen so why the delay?—and measures to build a third runway at Heathrow soonest in the interests of ensuring that our equally sclerotic air transport gateway is relieved of the problems that face it. That is beginning to damage our reputation and, increasingly, to inhibit our economic growth. A few decades ago, we missed the chance to build a third London airport at a site like Cublington. I think we would be deluded to wait decades more for some new estuarine airport down the Thames. It would come too late to have any effect at all in the pressing need for a world-class airport. We should simply build runway 3 soonest.

There is so much that the coalition can do in collaboration with hard-working businesses in areas like this, but I would like to end on a note which sometimes bishops do not trespass on, a spiritual note. I repeat that it is very important that hard-working Ministers, like hard-working businessmen, leave themselves enough time to think and to contemplate. My noble friend Lord Waldegrave of North Hill, who is not in his place today, says that he believes that it is impossible to think consistently about an issue for more than two minutes without resting one’s mental equipment. Thinking time is sometimes just as important as working time.