Finance Bill

Lord Razzall Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard) & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee negatived (Hansard) & Committee negatived (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 17th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Razzall (LD) [V]]

My Lords, this is clearly our opportunity to comment on the Chancellor’s economic policy. He has an unenviable task. The unemployment forecast is grim, particularly for the under-25s, and a recent forecast for the manufacturing industry shows the cost of the pandemic at £37.5 billion and recovery postponed to 2022 at the earliest. Obviously I welcome the overall thrust of his actions. Keynes is back, and hopefully austerity is dead. But the job of an opposition party is to provide constructive criticism and to suggest alternatives.

First, the criticism. Will £1,000 per employee brought back from furlough really provide an incentive to employers? For example, if a company employs 20 people at £15,000 per annum and brings them back at a cost of £300,000 per annum, will a £20,000 payment provide a real incentive to bring them back?

There is admirable aspiration in the Chancellor’s proposals for young people, but the proposal that 16 to 24 year-olds should receive a minimum wage for six-month work placements requires 350,000 work placements. In reality, as I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Hain, would agree, there is no chance of business offering 350,000 work placements. A similar scheme, the Future Jobs Fund referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, introduced after the 2008 crisis, produced only 100,000 placements. If the Government are modelling themselves on Roosevelt’s 1930s New Deal, as Will Hutton has suggested, do we not need an organisation such as a national youth corps as an umbrella organisation to marshal placements? Otherwise, I fear these proposals will be more aspiration than reality.

I have three suggestions as additions to the Chancellor’s policy. First, why not raise the national insurance threshold to the level of the income tax threshold? That would provide an incentive for employers to take on staff and, obviously, would help the working poor. Secondly, we should establish an entity to take on the billions of pounds of toxic loans that will remain after the virus, as was done after the previous crisis and as is recommended by the leaders of all our major banks. Thirdly, there is Brexit. The government policy is clearly to crash out and blame Covid, but that will not work. In the current climate, will we really replace the European Union with China as a major trading partner and import chlorine-washed chicken from the United States as a price for a US trade deal? The only rational policy is to conduct negotiations to keep us as close as possible to the European Union, our largest trading partner. If we do not do that, I echo the comments made by a number of commentators on our Brexit policy, who have gone back to Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech in a different context:

“Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.”


Sadly, all of us will be the victims of this lunacy.