King’s Speech

Lord Stunell Excerpts

Wednesday 8th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to contribute to this debate and to have heard so many excellent speeches, including the two excellent maiden speeches. It is a shame that it is tinged by sadness at the death of Lord Judge, but it has been an excellent debate so far.

I shall respond to only one previous speaker. I gently suggest to the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, that, if there were 8,000 amendments, of which 2,400 came from the Government, it is stretching matters a little bit to complain that, on 125 of them, there were votes that the Government lost. I suggest to him that perhaps this House is doing what it should do at about the right intensity.

I entered your Lordships’ House eight years ago, and during that time I have seen no fewer than five Prime Ministers in office—although there have actually been six Administrations, because we had a caretaker one last year, with its own set of Secretaries of State and Ministers. It has been a turbulent period, with plenty of policy zig-zags, and this King’s Speech introduces another few. But this time, we are told, it is not by accident because it is deliberately setting off in a new policy direction for the Prime Minister.

I want to speak today on the devolution policy option. I start by pointing out that, in the eight years that I have been in this House, the department responsible for devolution in England has gone through three name changes, seven changes of Secretary of State and 12 different Housing Ministers. No other government policy area has had so many zig-zags. That is exemplified by the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill in the last Session, which was introduced in May 2022 and gained Royal Assent only in October 2023—17 months, four Administrations and three Prime Ministers later. During the passage of that Bill, local housing targets started off mandatory under one Prime Minister, were denounced by the second as Stalinist and are now said to be only advisory by the third. And still no one knows how the Government propose that levelling up and regeneration are to be measured, let alone how they are to be paid for.

Instead, we have another zig—or maybe another zag—with the gracious Speech talking of the Government’s priority being addressing inflation

“over demands for greater spending or borrowing”.

Your Lordships can take that as a pretty broad hint that any levelling-up funding announced is more likely to be taken—reshuffled—from existing budgets, rather than providing the extra billions needed to make a real impact.

We got a taste of that with the boastful announcement last month that, in compensation for the cancellation of the high-speed train link to the north-west, a brand-new tram link for Manchester Airport would be built. That tram link had already been built and had run successfully for years, but the Government had not noticed and simply reannounced it. Afterwards, by way of excuse, Ministers explained that the airport link had only been illustrative of the many benefits that would come from the cancellation of high-speed rail.

In so many ways, I fear that they were right: the airport tram link is indeed illustrative, but not in the way that Ministers intended. In particular, it is illustrative that the benefits announced or prefigured in the King’s Speech came in two different categories. On the one hand, there are the things that were going to happen anyway—or even, as in the case of the airport tram, things that have already happened; on the other hand, all the other items announced in the King’s Speech—or via the huge pile of press releases or in ministerial sound- bites—are not best described by the word “illustrative” so much as by the word “illusory”. There is neither the money nor the time for any of them to happen, even if—and it is a rather big “if”—there is a willingness in Downing Street to achieve them. Downing Street is not only the Prime Minister but the Chancellor. So what weight should we give to the commitment in the gracious Speech that the

“Government will deliver a long-term plan to regenerate towns and put local people in control of their future”?

I want to hear what the Minister, in replying to this debate, has to offer us on that.

With no money to spend and no time to spend it, what are we to expect from the Government instead? Will there be more legislation, such as a LUR Bill 2.0? Obviously not, as the Government do not have 17 months, which seems to be the standard time for that sort of Bill to take. Can the Minister tell us exactly what will come? Will it be money for devolution? No, the Chancellor will not give that. Will there be time for devolution? No, the calendar will not give that. Will he introduce a very small LUR-style Bill—a LUR Bill 1.1, not 2.0—as a token Bill to fit some headlines? Surely not, and I think it would reassure noble Lords to hear that he has no such plan—I do not think that we could take the excitement of a second Bill. That seems to leave only miracles and dreams on offer, which makes me wonder why on earth the Government thought that it was a good idea to put devolution on the Order Paper in the first place.