Littering from Vehicles Bill [HL]

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to my noble friend Lord Marlesford for two reasons. First, I support what he is doing, and, secondly, as we are having a general debate about litter, it means that my own Bill, which will be taken as the last business today, will, in the quickest possible time ever, go through its Second Reading.

I shall try to introduce a little bit of internationalism into this debate. I like driving cars. My father spent his life motor-racing, including in a great Talbot, which my noble friend here may well recall, and I have worked internationally. I do not like going by train; I drive probably hundreds of thousands of miles across the continent of Europe. The biggest single change that I have noticed has been the improvement in the quality of the roads, the cleanliness of the roads and the greater facilities for disposing of rubbish. More than that, whereas we would have thought that our French cousins were a little bit lackadaisical in these matters, they have now become some of the toughest people in Europe. The fines imposed on the spot can be very severe as well.

I am assuming that this Bill covers things such as what falls off the back of a lorry. Things dropping off the back are, to some extent, litter and are extremely dangerous, particularly when empty lorries, usually from eastern Europe, are moving at extremely high speeds. That leads to more chipped and broken windscreens, and of course there are companies which believe that, even if you have a microchip in your windscreen, you can claim for a new one on your insurance, and that automatically puts up your insurance premium.

However, it is the general attitude to cleanliness that I find intriguing. Your Lordships will know that much of continental Europe—Germany, France and Italy—has weekly, or often twice-weekly, markets within local communities. At one time, they would remain relatively uncleaned, but now, within a matter of hours of shutting down, they are cleaned completely. People who bring in lorries and other vehicles are punished very severely if they do not stick to the rules. It is quite a simple punishment: everybody sneaks on their neighbours, a little man from the environment department turns up and, before you know it, you are given a little fine, which you have to pay at the post office within a very short period. If you do not, the fine doubles and doubles and doubles and, before long, you find that another person turns up suggesting that they should take your car away.

I happen to be a wine producer in France. We have a major problem there, which I had not realised. When you deliver grapes to be pressed, you may have juice running off the back of the trailer. You are now required to clean that up. Every single bit and piece must be collected, and the rubbish collections are superb. We have to admit that here in the London area in the UK there has been a dramatic improvement in rubbish collecting. However, the problem that we have with cars is: what do you put the rubbish in before you dispose of it? My wife gave me a whole range of nappy bags. I carry three or four of them—I have two in my pocket at the moment; I had not realised—in which to put things that I may have in my car. You drive a long distance eating wine gums and so on, you put the packet in the bag and when you stop for petrol you find that there are bins in which to dispose of it. That is now true of most garages in the United Kingdom. Because they are selling food and other items, they have bins in which to dispose of the rubbish. Therefore, dealing with these issues is purely a matter of organisation.

Looking at the international scene, I also find that now, believe it or not, some of the most badly behaved people are British families in large 4x4s driving to the Alps to ski. I have followed them occasionally and, for a bit of fun, have taken a note of their vehicle registration numbers. Occasionally, because I have friends in the DVLA, I manage to find their telephone number and I give them a ring. I just say, “I happen to be involved in the political world a bit, and it was noticed that at a particular point you did this”. Most of the continental motorways have a sign every kilometre or half-kilometre, or even more frequently, so you know exactly where you are, as do the spies. If the police decide that they may be a little short of income for Christmas, the number of fines seems to go up. There is of course absolutely no connection between the two issues, but this is self-interest.

There is something that I suggest should happen in this country. If you are travelling a long distance, you switch on the radio. Usually, I switch on a programme that broadcasts a mixture of music at my level, which is relatively low, and it then provides me with information. Usually a voice will say, “It’s Gloria here. Watch out. A bit has fallen off the back of a lorry at so-and-so”. You are given a complete report of what is happening. This occurs with smaller roads as well. If you have the new systems that you plug in, you can get everything you want. There is no reason why greater controls cannot be introduced effectively by using those systems. I suggest that one way of doing this is to get the radio stations, which are listened to by people travelling in cars, to point these things out.

I am really grateful to my noble friend Lord Marlesford, and I am also looking forward to being able to—

[Lord Lea of Crondall]

According to the noble Lord’s logic, would the answer be that all the Brits should go and live in France and all the French should come and live here?

[Lord Selsdon]

The noble Lord has raised an interesting point. One worry is that most of the rich French seem to want to come and live here, but in general they are among the tidiest people of all. I am grateful to the noble Lord for making that point. We are in an international world and one of the difficulties has been in training tourists and others in how to behave when they come here, because there are inadequate bins in which to dispose of rubbish. Noble Lords might like to ask themselves: where in Parliament is there a bin to dispose of something? It is quite difficult to find one.

I am grateful to my noble friend. He has done his usual Marlesford job: he is really nice and gentle but, when it gets down to it, he sticks the knife in.

Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Friday 19th July 2013 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Selsdon]

That the Bill be read a second time.

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, this is a relatively simple Bill that began in my life almost as soon as I joined the House 50 years ago. One of the things that I found, not having rubber soles on my shoes, was that when walking backwards and forwards as a most junior Member I collected a large amount of chewing gum on my feet. I have never chewed gum and I find it extremely difficult to get rid of. Some time later, I was asked whether I would make an issue of it, because I did not smoke or chew gum. I asked a simple Question on chewing gum, way back in, I suppose, 2009, which the Government could not answer.

Chewing gum and cigarettes are defined as litter under the 1990 Act, and litter is what we have been debating today. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Marlesford for there being enough people to discuss the subject, because there is no need for an enormous Second Reading debate about something that is quite obvious. It is simply a matter of considering what regulations could be introduced to make the system work.

I suppose that I ought to try to explain to your Lordships why chewing gum and cigarettes—or rather the nuisance value they create—are of such importance. Chewing gum is used by 28 million people in the United Kingdom. One might have thought, when smoking was restricted, that cigarettes would become less of a problem. However, they are still more than a problem, with 200 million cigarette butts thrown away each day in the United Kingdom. More than 1 billion packs of chewing gum are sold every year, and chewing gum and cigarettes account for 40% of street litter. However, it is small litter, which is irritating. The problem is that the gum sticks to the paving stones, and 92% of all paving stones have had gum on them.

When I started on this issue, I suggested to Black Rod that we should make Parliament a chewing gum-free zone. I produced some posters to go outside and suggested that there should be little bins in which to put things. I did not get very far. There was a cynical look on his face, as there usually is when I make cynical suggestions.

I then set out on a campaign. I realised that most cigarette butts and gum appear near public buildings. In fact, there is a conflict of interest in that we want more and more people, particularly tourists, to visit public buildings but we therefore have more and more gum. I was moved out of the third floor here a little while ago because my room was too hot and too small and I was given a grand office in Millbank, which I share with my noble friend Lord Coe. He is never there, so I have a larger office than I am probably entitled to. I found walking backwards and forwards a bit of a nuisance, and sometimes it took longer than six minutes if you were going to avoid being run over on the way. I therefore started to think of other things to do and began counting the number of blobs of chewing gum on the pavement between here and 1 Millbank. The largest number I found was 1,020—roughly five or six per square foot.

This is not necessarily the fault of the chewing gum people. I discussed this issue with Wrigley, which immediately thought that we were trying to get rid of chewing gum. However, Wrigley advised me only yesterday that it is fairly far advanced in producing a biodegradable gum—gum currently takes five years to degrade. Removing the gum is quite an expensive exercise. Up to 3.5 billion deposits of gum have been either spat or dropped on to the streets. For an average town centre, the cost of cleaning it up is only about £20,000 but the situation in the inner areas is different. It takes 17 weeks to remove chewing gum from Oxford Street but only 10 days for the streets to be covered with it again. Therefore, it seems that there is a simple lesson of organisation to be learnt.

As I said, chewing gum and butts are litter and they account for 40% of all litter. Talk of cleaning up litter follows on logically from the earlier Bill, and I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Marlesford, who has saved me the trouble of giving an enormous great speech or monologue on the subject. However, I just want to ask for a little guidance.

The Bill does not try to introduce any new legislation; it simply seeks to amend existing legislation to increase the littering fine for dropped cigarette butts from £75 to £100. However, what is the point of having those sorts of regulations if there is nowhere to put the butts or the gum? One immediately comes to the question of where the disposal units are. Your Lordships will know that this is a major tourist area and it is possible to work out where the children and others are. If you go to a bus stop, you will find lots of butts and lots of gum; if you go to a school you will find the same.

One day, I walked here from Sloane Square and counted up to 10,000 butts as I went, although I suddenly found that I was staggering as I tried to cross the road. The butts and gum stick on the concrete and do not go away, even if they are cleaned up. It erodes over time but leaves a bit of a mess. Therefore, the Bill very simply says that local authorities should be required to put bins in place. There are now special types of bin. This would require competitive tendering and so on, but cigarette butts and gum could be placed in them and they could be cleaned out. The cleaning systems are working quite well. The City of London has started on this and now finds that it has much cleaner streets. The question is what legislation can be put in place to make the provision of bins possible. I am told that the bins could, with relevant local authority approval, have advertising on them and thus be self-funding.

The idea of this Second Reading was that nobody would speak except for my noble friend Lord Erroll, so that we could jump very quickly to the Committee stage in the autumn. I had not intended that the Bill should be here today but the Government said, “We’ve got a bit of space. Could you jump in?”. I wish that sometimes they would say that I did not always have to jump in at the last minute. However, I am one of those last-minute Lords. The thought is very simple: we do away with a detailed debate at Second Reading and move straight to Committee as soon as possible in the autumn.

Here comes the wild card. I have had a lot of pressure put on me to deal with a third ingredient that causes everyone anxiety. I am not sure how to describe it, but it relates to four-legged animals who pollute the streets. I cannot use the normal term, which I discussed with the clerks. Noble Lords who are professors in health said that the solution is very simple: one should revert to the old Latin words. We are talking of canine excreta, which is causing quite a lot of problems around the area. There is a need for bins for that as well.

When fouling by dogs takes place, local authorities have the opportunity to fine people. I complained bitterly to one local authority that it did not have enough signs, and it suddenly decided to increase the penalty from, I think, £150 to £2,500. We have a small dog in our house in London who I look after quite well. Suddenly, secretly in the night, a sign was put on the house opposite that said: “Fouling, £2,500”. I do not know under what licence the local authority can impose that. This is an interesting issue and we want the Government simply to agree with the Bill. I am sure that I will get a favourable response and we can discuss it later at some point in the autumn.

We have been in touch with all the local authorities around the country. The plan was that they would all come to a joint meeting, maybe with up to 100 people, where we would ask Ministers and others to discuss the matter. You do not want to put pressure on local authorities that cannot afford to do something, but you find some way to do it. One of the ideas discussed is that those who put up the bins might get tax allowances. There are all sorts of formulas to work out how economically it can be done. I have said enough so I will sit down for the moment. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the Minister because he has fallen into the trap of assuming that I have not done more research than his department. He gave a classic ministerial response which was well delivered and charming. It is, of course, wrong, but that does not matter. He referred to another Bill about unsolicited phone calls. I am sure he has read my Bill on that subject, which will be coming before the House very shortly.

I take fully the points made by the noble Earl. The objective of the Bill is to raise the issue. We will do that through the Chewing Gum Action Group and all the local authorities. It costs them £415 million a year to clean up the streets at the moment. Having worked in that sort of economic world, one would not even suggest things unless it was economic so to do. It is not just the nuisance value. There is an education programme that the Minister could perhaps advance. It is in front of public buildings—government and others—that the biggest amount of dropping takes place. That requires only a schoolteacher to say, “Put it in a bin” or for schools to have bins there, because that is where it takes place, or outside concert halls. It is not a difficult problem.

I am very grateful for the support I have here and outside. The idea is that we move this on to the Committee stage when various issues can be debated. I will arrange for everyone who is interested to be able to attend the meeting. I have the latest brief from Wrigley on the progress it is making. It was delivered this morning. When I was an economist in an advertising agency, Wrigley was one of our clients.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

Bee Population

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Thursday 10th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, one of the great privileges of being in your Lordships’ House is that when one speaks late in the list, one gets the feeling of being an outpatient at some form of university college hospital where you are bound to learn. You also get a dry feeling in your throat while you are waiting to speak. The answer to that is very simple: you should wiggle your toes, and just before you come into the Chamber you should have a small spoonful of liquid honey. Then you will not have that problem.

I am probably the least qualified person to speak today, and I do so mainly because I have a great regard for my noble friend Lord Moynihan. We had two great mentors: Lord Jellicoe was one, and for me the other was Lord Shackleton.

My involvement in beekeeping is rather strange. All I can do is to explain what happened to me rather accidentally in my life. At the start of the war I was exported, to be kept out of the way so I would not be knocked off. I came back as a five year-old to be put on my grandfather’s farm, and I had no coupons or sweets. I was told that my job was bees, and that I should move the beehive at night to put it near the chickens so that no one stole the eggs.

I was introduced to the bees as a small boy by someone who today we would call a beekeeper but was actually a German prisoner of war, who had great knowledge of such things. We had a whole range of people on the farm. I got quite interested in honey but I had been brought up in Canada with maple syrup. I was not quite sure how you got honey, and I thought it was probably illegal to try to do so because I did not have any coupons. When I was introduced to the bees, they became my friends. It was one of those strange relationships that you have as a child; I could not quite understand why, but I had a feeling that they got to know me.

I move on to many years later, during which I went into various activities. When I was in the banking world, one of the jobs that I had was to help to advise the Government of Jamaica—I suppose because I was conceived on the beach there during my father’s honeymoon, which is as good a reason as any. I was asked by Eddie Seaga if I could help with bees. I said, “I don’t know anything about bees”, but then I remembered Winnie-the-Pooh’s line,

“Isn't it funny how a bear likes honey?”.

When I first met the bees on my grandfather’s farm, I had a small teddy bear called Marmaduke, and I thought that by using that teddy bear I might possibly get a larger allowance of honey. That stuck in my mind when I was in Jamaica, and I was officially asked to help to reinstitute Jamaica’s logwood honey business. I have to say that I had not heard of logwood honey but I knew that it was quite important. I did not realise that Her Majesty had been given a patch of it, as well as a patch of Blue Mountain coffee. Together with the high commissioner, John Drinkall, I thought, “What do we do? They need some honey equipment”, but I had no idea where to get it. We formed the Wild Flower Honey Company of Jamaica and I managed to arrange export credit from Her Majesty’s Government, with the guarantee of the Wild Flower Honey Company of Jamaica, which had 10,000 Jamaican dollars. I did not know that I had put in half of that sum; indeed, at the time I had not, but I was soon asked to make the payment.

So you arrive back here, and then Mr Seaga arrives here on a visit and you get invited to go to Downing Street for the first time for lunch because you are an important investor in Jamaica. The Prime Minister gets up and says, “We are very happy to have some big investors in Jamaica here, particularly Lord Selsdon, who has a substantial investment in the honey business of 5,000 Jamaican dollars”.

Those are the sorts of things that stick in the back of your mind and suddenly come to the fore on occasions such as just before Christmas, when the wax chandlers brigade invited me to go and speak at their annual dinner where they would introduce a new master. Although I introduced the Powers of Entry Bill and the Bees Act was within that, I knew only roughly what I was talking about—but they gave me some help.

Your Lordships will know that under the powers of entry in the Bees Act, if you happen to see a bee on your property supping nectar, you may follow it wherever it goes to take a share of what is in the hive. The Home Office confirmed that that provision is still extant, which is an interesting point for noble Lords who are beekeepers and feel that their bees may be roaming.

As I roam around, I come back to perhaps the more serious issue here. By various accidents, I happen to be a peasant farmer in Provence. We have an ancient vineyard: my neighbours have all been there since the Templiers or even before and, of course, you have the normal combination of honey, olive, wine and fig. If one goes back into the mists of time, it is not all about eating locusts and wild honey, but you realise the importance of the history of honey throughout the whole of the Mediterranean. It was more than just a product—it was a culture. We do not have bees, but we have commuting bees. I look after about 15 hectares of vines for other people, and I have a fairly rough team down there, who will be longing to get the full translated text of this debate today. I will try to arrange this, perhaps through the Information Office here, because it is an important cult.

In general, what we deal in is mono-floral honeys. That means that you want the bees to sup off the chestnut trees or the lavender, so they commute. They come in on a lorry in hives painted in different colours, because I am told they can recognise colours and know where to go. These are placed in strategic positions and then later they are moved on up to the Haut Var when the lavender harvest starts. It was suggested that I should have a whole range of hives and become a beekeeper myself. However, the instructors there—as I call them, because they are pretty switched-on—said that I would have to spend at least half the year there for the bees to trust me. I said, “Even if they are commuting bees?” They said, “Yes, because they do get to know you”.

Normally, every year I bring back a bit of olive oil in small bottles to the important people who make decisions—who are not Members of this House—either olive oil or lavender bags or honey, but this year we had no honey. The problems were partly on account of the weather because we go from plus 40 degrees to minus 20, but the bees survive. There is very little varroa disease, and I cannot quite work out how it all fits together.

One of the projects I was involved with previously was with Lord Shackleton. He said to me, “Ah, you know a bit about bees and honey, can you help with the Noah’s Ark?” The Noah’s Ark was the project to reinstitute agriculture and other things in the Falklands. What they wanted were some more bees that could effectively increase pollination. I always used to be given these strange tasks in your Lordships’ House when no one knew anything; they thought that neither did I, but I had to find out. The idea was that we should get a bee that would take off into the wind, rather than flying downwind to take off, and would go short distances, load up and be blown back down.

Now, often when there are many things to deal with, I go to the church and I go to the monasteries. In the end, I got Brother Peter from a monastery—or monkery as I call it—up in Cyprus, who said, “No problem, you want the Braemar bee. Ask the Queen Mother”. We got hold of the Queen Mother’s office and found that the Braemar bee had come from there, so we got a whole lot of bees put in a basket and off they went. But effectively we had to produce some queens as well, because queens can cost quite a lot of money. I did not know what the monks did, but you just make a bigger hole in the comb and the worker bees feed it and you get a bigger bee and therefore a queen bee, but that is beyond my competence. They went out there and, needless to say, it worked.

Over time, I have found that I have gained such affection for this particular subject and topic, but I did not realise that there are certain things that are helpful because of where I am in France. You need a jolly good fire every so often, and we have them in abundance. They clear everything up and, within months, the spring flowers are back as never before. You are not able to clear the sorts of forest that we have otherwise. One trick is to watch the tortoises because, when a fire is coming, the tortoise knows and goes to the side of the tree away from the fire and slowly digs down. He survives, whereas all the small birds fly around. The bees know the fire is coming long before anyone else; they move off and out and then come back.

I have found this an interesting subject. I think it is important and I would like to know more about it. The Bees Act will give you an introduction to it—but above all we should promote the bee and we should promote honey. Honey has medical abilities, for bruises and everything else. At the moment we are all talking every day about health. Every single problem in the health world is being announced on television, and scare ads are put in—but the medical contents and abilities of honey are considerable.

I support my noble friend and I believe that we should advance upon a major bee promotion business: have yourself named after a bee.

Water Industry (Financial Assistance) Bill

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, I have been up to my neck in water and sewage for most of my life, and if I speak for too long I know I will have some more thrown at me. I thought I would speak a bit about competence and a bit about history.

At this time in the morning many years ago I was in a hotel in Cairo and I felt rather ill. I picked up the phone because I felt so ill, but the phone did not work. I fell on the floor, and then I shrieked and someone came in. I had got something remarkably unusual: gippy tummy. A nice doctor turned up and I said, “What’s wrong with all this?”. He said, “Well, it’s the sewers, you know”. I said, “Really? I used to be in that world”. After a while, I went along to see the head man and said, “Why don’t we British, who built the sewers here for a million people in 1907, rebuild your sewers now that you have 10 million people?”.

I went out and formed a body called British Waste Water. It was a two-pound company. One pound was for me; the other person never turned up. We made a few proposals. The first thing that we had to do was bring the Egyptian swimming team back to swim across the channel that had been cancelled in 1956 when Butlins was organising it. We built a relationship.

The plan was to do a good job. We had not had much experience in the United Kingdom because there had been relatively little infrastructure spending. That project cost £2 billion. The Government provided £50 million of initial aid and another £500 million of export credit. We got all the British companies out there. They did not know what they were doing—they had not been near it. The problem was how to clean it all up. It took around eight years and, as I said, cost roughly £2 billion. The difference was made not only by the skills that were transplanted there but by Egypt suddenly being cleaned up. The tourism business could survive again because there were no problems.

To go down in Cairo, where the water table is only two feet below the ground, you have to open a hole and make a hatch like that of a submarine. Your building team go down as divers. You have to put compression in to keep the water out.

Finally, we needed to put in blue bricks. Only the British can build the best blue bricks. We wanted Egyptian bricklayers. One of them said to me, “We haven’t got the skills. Can you find some brickies?”. I was at Loughborough, where there was a pub called the Bricklayer’s Arms. We put some notices in the Bricklayer’s Arms and the brickies turned up. We then built a brick plant on the Nile, just like the pharaohs had, which was a great success. That project worked very well because the British got back their old technology. I know that whoever works on the Thames sewers will do a good job.

Out of all this comes an economic or cost-benefit analysis. I have dealt with the Thames for many years in relation to sport and recreation. I chair the Greater London and South East Council for Sport and Recreation. I have rowed up and down the Thames. I have listened to presentations which said that rowers might be poisoned. However, it is a very simple matter of collecting the right stuff and emptying it. It is not a big job.

However, what happened after Cairo? What did those same contractors do? They went off and built the Channel Tunnel. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, was involved in that as well. I am trying to say that our knowledge and experience in this country may have died in many things, but in water and sewerage we are still among the best in the world, if not the best. I have no worries about the problem of contractors. I would of course take them down the Thames in barges. It is just a question of organisation. Once upon a time, we were good at organising but this House is obviously not as good at organising its business as it ought to be.

Agriculture: Global Food Security

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Thursday 12th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, I am extremely honoured to be able to speak in the debate introduced by my noble friend Lady Byford. However, I feel a sense of nervousness, surrounded as I am by landed Barons and belted Earls—although I am not sure what a belted Earl is. I doff my cap to them because I have the humility to be a peasant farmer. I am a French peasant farmer, with a numéro SIREN and SIRET, in a vineyard in Provence from where wine shipped to the United Kingdom in the second century BC arrived at Hengistbury Head. It was in this area that vin clair was first introduced, which later became claret and Bordeaux. As noble Lords will know, Bordeaux of reasonable troisième cru is selling at £124 a bottle, and China is buying more wine from Bordeaux than the United Kingdom and America put together.

As a peasant farmer, I suffer and feel for others around the world. We suffer inevitably from the dangers of flood, pestilence and frost. This year has not been good—and when a year is bad, there is often intervention by the state. The river has risen by 12 metres three times this year. The house has had to be redecorated and the roof taken off. At the moment we are struggling to find sufficient vines to replant to replace 8,000 that were lost. Wild boar ate nearly six tonnes of grapes last year while we only managed to get one. Here there is a problem with bureaucracy. You cannot eat a wild boar unless it has been slaughtered in an official EU slaughterhouse. Six people with guns do not qualify as an EU slaughterhouse, so I have not been able to eat any part of a wild boar.

Against this background I raise certain issues. When there are problems, the state helps. However, it surveys you from above. It counts the number of vines to make sure that you have no more than a certain number of empty ones, otherwise you may lose your appellation contrôlée. It is confusing because they are not used to having an idiot like me down there. I am meant to be Lord Selsdon, but the name does not matter because I have to be called “Monsieur Lord”. I have the great privilege to announce further benefits in kind. I have received a grant from the state—and an international one at that. It was addressed to “Lord Catastrophe Naturelle”. For a long time I have been a walking disaster at most things in life, but I am proud of this.

In my job around the world, I have always looked at peasant farmers and the community that comes with agriculture. My interest in the subject of global food security goes back to when I found myself, aged four and with my two year-old sister, in a strange British nursery school that had emigrated from Rottingdean to Canada because the Germans were coming. I did not know my parents at all in Canada, but I liked the war because I liked ships. Sometimes I listened to Mr Churchill and Mr Roosevelt. I wanted to know why all the ships were being sunk by U-boats. Someone said that it was because England—I was Scottish but they did not mention Scotland—would starve without food. It never entered my mind that war and lack of food were related. Starvation was coming because of a lack of food.

As one looks around the world today, one concludes that there are plenty of places to produce food. When I came back to England, I went to my grandfather's farm. I did not know much, but I was put in charge of chickens, ducks and rabbits. There was rationing, which I was not used to because I had been well fed. We had to send the eggs to people in London, unless they were laid in hedgerows, when you could not tell their age. You could float them, but you were not allowed to send eggs that had been laid in hedgerows because they might be bad by the time they arrived. These eggs were put into that lovely substance called isinglass, where you would keep them for ever and a day. Occasionally, one of the ducks would kill a chicken. We did not have to send off the chicken, but could eat it. We had an American airborne division nearby. They wanted eggs and, as a small boy, I would do a trade. They would give me petrol from the Jeep and that would enable my grandfather to let me, at the age of six, drive the green van.

All my life I have been interested in agricultural production. After I left industry, I went to work in a team doing agricultural and economic research. We looked at the world. Like the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Coles, I asked: “Where does food come from?”. When I was trying to save the shipbuilding industry in England, which failed, the Department for Transport kindly gave me a chart which I still value desperately. The chart shows the position of Her Majesty’s ships at sea and in harbour 14 days after I was born, in 1937. I should add that the figures for British commodity imports at that time—the amount we had to import as a percentage of the total—from 20 world regions were: wheat, 64 per cent; maize, 93 per cent; barley, 86 per cent; rice, 72 per cent; meat, 80 per cent; coffee, 79 per cent; cocoa, 90 per cent; tea, 96 per cent, and so on—including rubber and other agricultural products. I realised that we would never be self-sufficient in this country, but also that we had a duty to our Commonwealth countries.

The first job that I took on involved agricultural work for the States of Jersey. We found that Jersey royal potatoes were being priced out of the market but that we could get a higher price if they were shipped on a Sunday from Southampton and were all the same size and put in round, rather smart buckets. This idea of agricultural production led us also to sell daffodils in bud to families—you could not sell them to boyfriends and girlfriends. Daffodils in bud could be shipped cheaper. From there I moved to economic work for the Government of India and what they could produce—namely wool and, mainly, minerals, but not much food. My job always was to work out the most economic way of getting something from its place of growing to the market, and that taught me a lot. When I chaired the Government’s Middle East trade committee we looked at food shortages and where things came from. We went on missions together, often pushed by Lord Shackleton and Lord Jellicoe, to such places as French West Africa. I never realised that the Ivory Coast produced so many pineapples or what happened in other countries. Products from French territories would arrive the next day fresh in the markets at Les Halles and later in Rungis.

I now turn to one of the forgotten opportunities. One of the main reasons for our being in all the British territories—the Commonwealth, as we call it today—was to produce food, at which we were very good. It was highly organised and highly efficient, with very good security of transport. We have forgotten that. Of the other territories, the greatest in my view is the Sudan, where I spent a long time looking at the production of grain. Sudan was meant to be the breadbasket of the Middle East. We had the Gezira scheme for cotton, which produced some of the best in the world. All those areas and territories could return.

I thought that I would make some suggestions to some of your Lordships, in particular to the rich, belted Earls and Barons who might join in. We have a certain technology in the United Kingdom. I have already declared that I am intending to order six agricultural satellites. With the new technology we can plot from satellites the growth pattern of deserts and everywhere else over the year, and predict where there will be famine. We have forgotten this technology. Although we may be able to produce things here, the British in one form or another may often be better at managing other people’s affairs than they are their own. At 44,000 kilometres, the Commonwealth has the longest coastline in the world. We look at global food security, which must inevitably include the sea, and we say that there are great opportunities for our resources, particularly our human and technological skills, to be used worldwide. I would hate for us to concentrate just on little Britain.

Queen's Speech

Lord Selsdon Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Selsdon]

My Lords, over the years that I have been in this House, I have found myself more and more confused by government. Government seem to try, in the interests of everyone, to do too much too often, and confusion reigns. I was brought up to believe that government could do only three things: tax, spend and legislate. I worked in the clearing bank sector, where, again, you did only three things: you took deposits, you made loans and you collected money.

The lifeblood of our country was effectively trade, and I apologise for having been brought up in the world of trade and having to say that I sat below the salt. However, when I look at the Annunciator, which lists the items covered by this debate, it seems that the word “trade” has almost disappeared from the agenda. I ask the Minister, when he comes to reply, whether he can recall who is responsible for trade these days.

I believe that if we look at the strength or weakness of our economy, the answer lies in trading ourselves out of the difficulty. These problems have happened historically, and perhaps I may quote a problem that occurred not so long ago when the monarch at the time set up a committee—not a quango or an ango—

“to take into their consideration, the true causes of the decay of trade and scarcity of coyne … and to consult the means for the removing of these inconveniencies”.

That was in 1621 after the Armada. Your Lordships will be aware that the Armada tapestries will soon be arriving for exhibition here and it will be very moving to see them. However, the theme will be the defence of the realm and the importance of trade.

If we are to trade, we must look at the situation today. Since the war, we have moved from an equal balance of payments—balancing in visibles or goods—to a deficit of £100 billion. We have moved from a currency that was relatively strong and stable to one which is almost the weakest in the world. To put it in simple terms, the kilometre now has the same value as the mile. When we have a balance of payments deficit on visibles, the depreciation of our currency means that we are a major importing nation, as we always have been. The cost of our imports has risen in direct proportion to the weakness of our currency and there seems no possibility of that currency strengthening. There were moments when there was a natural boom, such as when the retail trade purchased goods before Christmas when the currency was high and sold when the currency was lower. Vast expenditure took place when low-cost airlines brought foreigners here to do their Christmas shopping, instead of taking the British abroad on holiday.

Unless we have a stable currency and think of our future as a trading nation, we shall be lost. However, the United Kingdom is one of the few countries in the world which automatically has a worldwide role. That is not necessarily due to the Commonwealth but due to our history of being able to invest and to set up in whatever sector. We are good managers and we have the advantage of the English language. Take the shortage of food: it would be easy for the British agricultural sector, with the right support, to go into any country in Africa and to treble or to quadruple agricultural production. The Sudan was to be the bread basket of the Middle East and the Gezira scheme ran without problems for years. We need to consider those areas.

I have just written a Green Paper called Shipping it Green. I have raised this in your Lordships’ House before but, if we get together with the Commonwealth, we can control the largest sector of the world in many areas and in relation to the sea. Can the Minister tell me today who is President of the Board of Trade? What is the Board of Trade and what are the Minister's responsibilities? In the mean time, I see the noble Lord, Lord Myners, in his place. He might be able to answer my worrying question about the siphoning off of money into non-departmental public bodies, which are known as quangos. In my view, it has risen to somewhere around £50 billion to £60 billion a year. Can the Minister tell me the current budget for those bodies and by how much the Government propose to cut them?