Freedom of Movement
Lord Whitty Excerpts(4 years, 12 months ago)
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Baroness Williams of Trafford
I am not sure what the question was there. As for stealing UK citizens’ rights, from a UK point of view we have made provision for EU citizens’ rights in the UK. It is clearly up to individual member states how they reciprocally deal with that.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, surely the central issue here is that freedom of movement is tied up with the delivery of services. Service industries, which dominate our economy, can trade effectively only if their personnel can be moved. It is not just a question of border control; every service industry, from banking to ballet dancing, needs to move people across borders. The problem is that in any future deal—for example, as set out in the political declaration—the two issues of mobility and access to the single market by the service industries are separated. It is time that the Government brought those two strategies together, otherwise the bulk of our service industries will suffer.
Baroness Williams of Trafford
The noble Lord is right: it is absolutely clear that we need an environment friendly to businesses both at home and abroad, and “abroad” will include the EU when we leave it. Our immigration system will be skills-based. We want the brightest and best to come to this country to work, study and live. That is why we consulted the MAC on our future system.
World Bank: Selection Process for President
Lord Whitty Excerpts(5 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Bates
The nomination process will close on 14 March. The candidates will then be assessed by the executive board of directors and a decision will be made ahead of the spring meetings in Washington between 12 and 14 April.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, if the outcome of the shortlist is that the only remaining candidate is someone who appears to deny climate change and to adopt policies meaning that the good work the World Bank has done on sustainable development would be reversed, would the Government be prepared to veto such an appointment in those circumstances?
Taxation (Cross-border Trade) Bill
Lord Whitty ExcerptsTuesday 4th September 2018
(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, the Minister gave a very succinct introduction to the Bill but, looking at it, it is pretty hefty. It would normally be dismissed as technocratic and complex, but it is nevertheless more substantial than perhaps the Government or the Minister suggest. Moreover, it is on a subject that neither this House nor the whole of Parliament has considered as part of a legislative programme for more than 40 years. All the issues, such as tariffs and some of the other things that are either dealt with or partially dealt with in the Bill, have been matters for the EU. Moreover, the denial of this House’s detailed scrutiny by designating this a supply Bill is an affront to this House and its committees’ constructive role in dealing with this very difficult Brexit issue.
Broadly, I make three points. First, it is a nonsense for us to consider the Bill separately from the Trade Bill that will reach us next week and from wider issues. There are a number of reasons for that, many of which have already been spelled out. Among other things, the Trade Bill sets up the Trade Remedies Authority. It contains the outline of the powers of that authority and the situations in which they would arise. But the actual fiscal remedies and some of the reasons for engaging with those fiscal remedies are in this Bill but without the overall framework, which is in the Trade Bill. The two need to be considered together and we need to address what kind of new, independent trade remedies body we need in those circumstances.
One problem with the Bill is that it is inevitably a contingency Bill, like much of the other legislation that has passed through this House in the Brexit context. But a contingency Bill should be able to deal with all the potential contingencies. As far as I can see, it deals with very few of them. It gives the powers, and some of those powers are subject to Henry VIII procedures, but it does not specify in which contexts those powers will operate.
We all know that there is still a range of possibilities for the final outcome of negotiations, which will probably not be known in November and will involve a long drawn-out process of coming up with a full-blown trade agreement with the EU. It is looking on the optimistic side that we will eventually reach such a deal, but it will be complex. If it is a free trade agreement, certain consequences follow. There will be consequences for our tariff levels, which will presumably be dealt with in the EU, but countries that are not in a free-trade agreement with us would have to abide by WTO rules. In other words, there would have to be an equivalent for all non-free trade agreement countries. That is a constraint on the powers that appear to be in this Bill.
We are of course in a situation where the Government are proposing the Chequers proceedings, which have in part been cut off at the knees by some of the amendments, referred to by others, that were passed in the Commons the other month. However, some are not appropriate for the different potential outcomes. If we are in a Chequers-facilitated customs arrangement, which the EU is at present rejecting, certain requirements need to be laid down in the Bill itself, including procedures, for example, on rules of origin. I think it was my noble friend Lord Tunnicliffe who said that at the moment there is a contradiction on how rules of origin are likely to be proceeded with. They will be proceeded with in one context for imports and another for exports from the UK to the EU.
A lot of questions have not been answered and they can be answered only by a full debate on all the aspects of trade policy and trade legislation before us, and how they would apply in different situations. To take another example, we know that currently both this Bill and the Trade Bill reflect the Government’s intention to roll over the existing EU-third country arrangements and simply apply them to the UK. However, you first have to ask the third country whether it will agree to that, and indeed in some circumstances whether the EU would agree to it because it is not as simple as all that, particularly when dealing with agreements involving a high degree of agricultural trade. You then have issues such as import quotas, which have to be split between the UK and the EU in the event of our leaving. Those quota issues are not addressed in the Bill.
There are other internal contradictions in the legislation, most of which have already been referred to because they arise from the amendments made at the behest of the ERG in another place. I happened to be in Brussels with your Lordships’ Select Committee on the day those amendments were passed. I am the only member of the committee present because the others are meeting upstairs. There was bemusement on the part of EU officials, including Monsieur Barnier himself, about what seemed to have happened; namely, the Prime Minister’s shiny golden Chequers agreement had been undermined within days by accepting the amendments produced by the ERG. Some of the amendments are ambiguous and I hope the Government’s lawyers are addressing the particulars. I will take just two examples, one of which is now Clause 54. It arose because of the need for reciprocity as far as the movers of those amendments were concerned, but no one is proposing reciprocity. We said in the Chequers proposals that we would be prepared to collect EU taxes at our borders. We have made no proposition that the EU should collect our taxes. Since we know that the EU is sniffy about the notion that we should collect its taxes, its representatives are hardly likely to fall over themselves with glee at the proposal that they should be subcontracted to collect our taxes. Reciprocity in itself does not make sense in the context of the Chequers agreement.
It is also true—potentially disastrously so—that the following clause, Clause 55, which deals with Northern Ireland, could scupper any agreement on Northern Ireland, which is difficult enough in any case. Let me make it clear that I am not in favour of a border down the Irish Sea, but it is true that already, before we have left the EU, Northern Ireland is dealt with separately in some respects on trade issues. It has a regulatory structure for food and farming that is effectively the same as that of the Republic of Ireland. It is a single epidemiological area in relation to animal disease. There are other provisions in terms of the ability to acquire Irish citizenship and therefore EU citizenship, which mean that Northern Ireland is being dealt with differently from the rest of the United Kingdom. As my noble friend has said, the common electricity market will also have to be dealt with differently from the energy market in the rest of the United Kingdom. To lay down in that amendment that no such separate provision, which implies no regulatory provision, should apply to Northern Ireland that does not apply to the rest of the United Kingdom, seems yet another barrier to a proper agreement on the Northern Irish border.
My last point is probably the most important. I cannot find anywhere in the Bill provision for parliamentary scrutiny of future trade negotiations and outcomes—and therefore tariffs and tariff regulation —which is the subject matter of the Bill. Before we were EU members, all treaties were regarded as deliverable through the royal prerogative; they were therefore a matter for the Government, not Parliament. That was modified slightly in 2010 as far as treaties in general are concerned, but trade treaties over the past 40 years have very much been subject to scrutiny in great detail in the European Parliament. Our negotiating stance and tactics and the final outcome have been subject to scrutiny by European Parliament representatives. We propose moving to a situation where such trade agreements will not be dealt with like that, at least not explicitly, in default of any government commitment. We are reverting to the time when medieval monarchs made these deals between themselves and we were sheltered under the royal prerogative.
It is not only Europe that is subject to detailed parliamentary scrutiny; so are potential partners with Europe. Congress had a major role when the US was trying to negotiate the TTIP with the EU, as did the Canadian Parliament. We need a determination by this House and another place for a strong, authoritative international trade committee, either jointly or in both Houses, to oversee our future arrangements, in the context of which the detailed propositions in the Bill will operate. Without that, we will take back control not for the people’s representatives but for the benefit of the Executive alone.
Budget Statement
Lord Whitty Excerpts(6 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Lea of Crondall (Lab)
My Lords, the state of the economy at the moment is gloomy in the extreme. I am sorry to those people who think that we ought to say that there is light at the end of the tunnel, but at the moment, there is not. I follow the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, in saying that we have to target one thing above all: we have to jack up the rate of economic growth to 2% or 3%. Nothing else will work unless we do that. That sounds a bit like George Brown in 1964; I say, “Come back George Brown, all is forgiven”.
Lord Lea of Crondall
Some parts are forgiven. We have to have a new deal in both senses of the term: a TVA-type new deal and a new deal for workers. There is an ambiguity to what a lot of the speeches add up to of where this productivity problem arises.
In passing, the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, made a speech that could have been interpreted as saying he does not quite believe the statistics and that the economy is growing in a way we have not recognised. I used to be a bit of a guru on national income accounting. Income, output and expenditure have to be measured to match. I cannot see how the ONS can be all that wrong in saying that the economy is not growing by nought point something.
On the idea that there is some mysterious factor in the economy we are not measuring, a lot of people in Silicon Valley believe the zillions of extra things we can do with the things in our pockets—our phones—must mean that productivity is rising. There is a puzzle there, but for the moment the statisticians are correct: they are not adding to our productive potential. We are just playing around on our mobile phones; we are not doing anything useful with them. That is a big factor, but at the moment there is nothing that is measurably happening.
We can have a look at measuring the rate of economic growth, but everything else is second order. The main candidate for something the Chancellor can do about it is public investment. It is a long time since we have been worried about productive potential, but it is the only term that meets where we are at the moment. It goes back to the strange discussion we had the other day on the industrial strategy with the noble Lord, Lord Henley, when he took some comfort from the fact that unemployment is down and that this was a good way of justifying lower productivity—“Don’t you people want lower unemployment?” It is one of those questions you get on the BBC’s “Today” programme, as our friend Mr John McDonnell found out the other day. You cannot look at a dynamic economy by trying to stick to questions and answers such as that.
We have to jack up the rate of investment. Whether we get the money off the Norwegian wealth fund, which is now worth $1 trillion, or not I do not know, but there has to be a dynamic piece of arithmetic and we can agree on some the answers—if you did get the economy to grow at that pace, then you would get this return through business growth and tax returns. We ought to raise the level of public discussion, whether at the BBC or anywhere else. We are not short of excellent material. The number of excellent reports we have heard mentioned is extraordinary. I will not go through them all because I only have two more minutes, but they all say roughly the same thing: we have a low pay trap, a low productivity trap and low investment, and we ought to transform the economy in some way. Mr McDonnell has said most of the right things about how to increase our productivity potential, as has the Social Mobility Commission. I congratulate Mr Milburn and the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, on the way they identified these cold and hot spots around the country, because that is also very important in terms of where public investment should be going.
We have to make sure there is some targeting in numerical terms in this debate—how do you get to, say, 3%? Even as a paper exercise it would show us where we need to do something. Without sounding as if it is all to do with pay, the fact is you cannot change the definition of value added without recognising that value added is pay and profits. There are people at the top earning zillions, but pay and productivity are low. I am not saying you do it just by increasing pay, but we cannot wallow as a zero economy, with zero growth in real pay and in productivity.
I have one final word on the Brexit effect. There are undoubtedly three very bad Brexit effects relating to this. First is an investment problem relating to trade barriers. The second is the spectre of the exchange rate falling, as it has at 90p to the euro. We can see circumstances in which it could well have parity with the euro. The third is the prospective collapse of investment in those industries with a single factory floor in Europe, whether it is Jaguar Land Rover, Airbus or Unilever, and all the other sorts of investment which require a change in the policy so that we stay in the single market and the customs union.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, the news for the Government since the Budget has not been great, and I am not even going to talk about Brexit—I will leave that until later in the week. On the economic side, the OBR projections have shown all too clearly that the austerity strategy has lamentably failed on all fronts: on debt, on growth, on productivity and on living standards. On the social side, the report of the Social Mobility Commission, compounded this morning by the further report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on child poverty, shows just how uneven life chances are in this country. We are greatly divided, societally and geographically. In that view, I have to differ from my former noble friend Lord Balfe. I think he had rather rose-coloured spectacles on today. There is great division in our society and the Budget will not help to address it.
I pick out three issues. One is the housing crisis, where I broadly follow the remarks just made by the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. The Government claim to have addressed the housing crisis, but it is a seriously misconstrued strategy, in so far as it has been so far revealed. It has attempted to tackle the wrong problems, mostly with the wrong measures and benefiting the wrong people. The second crisis, which has also been referred to at length in this debate, is the social care crisis. The Government have completely ignored it in this context. I hope the Minister will tell us that we are about to get a new White Paper with a strategy on social care. Both residential social care and care visitors are in colossal crisis.
Residential homes’ standards of care are diminishing as they cannot contend with the combination of squeezed resources and burgeoning demand. As we have heard in recent days from the CMA, of all people, some care homes are facing closure and bankruptcy. Local authority fees for care are capped too low to be economic for care homes or for care workers to be paid adequately. Private funders, who are often hard-pressed families themselves, are faced with fees of more than £45,000 a year and often forced to sell their own homes or their parents’ homes. In care homes, deteriorating conditions and slashed staffing levels make the final years of many of our elder people, some of our own age, and our parents and grandparents, an avoidable misery. Not all the generational disadvantage is in one direction.
On housing, I shall not say much more. Other noble Lords have clearly spelled out that if we are to achieve the 300,000 target that the Government now support, there will have to be a substantial increase in council house building. The Conservative Party still seems to have an antagonism to council houses and to local authorities being involved in housing provision. To meet their targets they will have to get over that, because the cut in stamp duty and the other measures announced by the Government do not address the right people. In most parts of the country, people with quite adequate incomes for all other purposes are unable ever to get on the housing ladder. That means we have to provide some form of rented accommodation. We know that the private rented sector has seen escalating rents and deteriorating conditions and security.
We are going back to a situation that existed 100 years ago, when there were only two forms of tenure: you either owned it or you rented it from a usually grasping, exploitative landlord. In many parts of the country, that spectre has returned already. The only reason people can afford to meet those rents, and in some cases meet their mortgage, is that they are bolstered by social security, particularly in the rented sector by housing benefit, which continues to grow, despite the Government’s attempts to limit it. We are effectively passing money from the state to private landlords. That is not a sensible housing policy, a sensible social policy or a sensible economic policy. We therefore need to follow the well-trodden path of creating greater social housing, through both councils and housing associations, to get decent, well-built, sustainable homes for the majority of our people. The Government are ignoring that at their peril. I hope that the social housing Green Paper, or whatever it will be, calms my fears about that, but I have seen no indication from anything any government Minister has said so far that gives me any cause for comfort.
I know there are those who will say that I see the housing market through the eyes of a London-based politician, but I do not. The reality is the same in all parts of the country, particularly in the south-east. London prices have affected the whole of the south, including the south-east. They have also affected many of our other great cities. The reality is that this is part of a bigger problem. It is part of the problem that was highlighted to some extent by the Social Mobility Commission: the overheating of the London economy and the relative advantage of people in London as against the rest of the country is causing grave dislocation in our society, our economy and, as the Brexit vote shows—I promised not to mention Brexit—our body politic between those who are benefiting, directly or indirectly, partially or totally, from the London effect and those who are not. The families who live in the Midlands and the north, and in the rural areas of East Anglia and the south-west, where I live, are suffering from the fact that we have an unbalanced economy, yet there is no sign from the Government of developing a proper regional strategy.
For decades, in the early years of our being in the European Union, we relied on regional funds and structural funds from the European Union as a substitute for regional policy. The very small instruments for regional policy that the Labour Government instituted were abolished by the coalition. We need to go back to an interventionist industrial regional policy as well as an industrial strategy. At the moment we have some commitments towards a northern powerhouse but they have yet to be delivered and we have not even seen the machinery whereby they can be delivered. The third great gap in the Budget, after social care and housing, is the complete lack of any indication that the Government are about to have a rethink on regional policy in England.
Air Pollution
Lord Whitty Excerpts(9 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Whitty
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to reduce air pollution.
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper. In doing so, I declare a non-pecuniary interest as vice-president of Environmental Protection UK, which is campaigning on this issue.
Baroness Northover (LD)
My Lords, the Government have invested billions of pounds in measures to reduce air pollution, including incentives for low-emission vehicles and sustainable transport. Local authorities are also required to review and assess air quality under the local air quality management system. We support them in seeking to deliver local measures to meet national air quality objectives. We also work with the devolved Administrations to improve air quality across the United Kingdom.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her reply, but does she recognise that there are still 29,000 people whose deaths are attributable to air pollution, mainly induced by traffic? Does she also recognise that the UK is in clear breach of EU limits in large parts of the country, particularly urban areas; that the WHO found a lot of the assessed areas were at dangerous levels, particularly for nitrogen dioxide; and that the Government’s own forecasts suggest we will not reach EU limits for London, Yorkshire and the West Midlands until 2030, 15 years after the deadline?
Does the Minister accept that the Government have virtually abandoned previous local and national air quality strategies and the development of low-emission zones, and have ignored the Environmental Audit Committee’s recommendations? When are we going to see a proper government strategy on air quality?
Baroness Northover
My Lords, I assure the noble Lord that we take this extremely seriously and I would refute the latter part of his question. He will know that we have managed to limit most pollutants and these are now below the legally binding EU limit values. The outstanding one is nitrogen dioxide, which has been a challenge not only for the United Kingdom but for 17 of the 27 EU states. We are working very hard to combat this.
Water Bill
Lord Whitty Excerpts(10 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord Whitty
“Consumer objective
In section 2(2B) of the Water Industry Act 1991, after “interests of” insert “current and future”.”
Lord Whitty (Lab)
My Lords, Amendment 109 is one of several before us today that are intended to tweak Ofwat’s responsibility into a more long-term aim on sustainability and resilience.
Ofwat is an economic regulator and currently its prime duty is to the interests of consumers—the consumer objective. But Ofwat has never been simply an economic regulator and since 2003—2005 in terms of implementation—it has had secondary duties relating to environmental and social sustainability. We will be having a debate shortly about whether those duties, too, should be primary duties.
Although historically it would be true to say that Ofwat has interpreted its economic regulator status somewhat narrowly, in practice it has always had a sustainability dimension—albeit at times that this may have been interpreted rather weakly. The five-yearly price review looks at financing long-term infrastructure as well as immediate business and householder water supply demands. In this Bill, there is yet more emphasis on social and environmental considerations. As the next but one debate will show, some of your Lordships want to take that further.
It is important to recognise that even the purely, or mainly, economic interest of the consumer—the need for water at affordable prices—is multifaceted and changes over different timeframes. As an economic regulator, Ofwat should act not only in the current interest of consumers, or the next-five-years’ interest, but in the long-term interest of both current consumers and future consumers. That duty fits more clearly with resilience and sustainability considerations or objectives. My amendment would make that clear. It would make it clear that Ofwat’s responsibility, as laid down simply in terms of consumers in the 1991 Act and repeated thereafter, should apply also to future consumers. We made a similar change regarding Ofgem in the Energy Act passed by the Labour Government in 2008. Ofgem has responsibility for future consumers. Some might argue that that has not made a dramatic difference to Ofgem’s deliberations, but at least that responsibility is clearly there. It has had the effect of holding it responsible for such longer-term issues.
In the water sector, we have five-yearly price reviews, six-year water catchment management plans and 25-year water resource management plans. They all require water undertakers to be concerned about the long term. However, it is also important that the consumer objective is seen in the long as well as the short term. That is what my amendment seeks to ensure. I beg to move.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Lord De Mauley) (Con)
My Lords, the purpose of Amendment 109 is to ensure that, in discharging its primary duty to protect consumers, Ofwat must take account of the needs of both current and future customers.
I agree that this is an essential objective. Water is an industry with unusually long planning and investment horizons. Our water resources management-planning processes require companies to plan, as a minimum, 25 years ahead and encourage them to plan over much longer timeframes. Although much of our current infrastructure will be expected to serve customers well for decades or even centuries to come, this is why we have introduced the new duty of resilience, which requires Ofwat to secure the long-term resilience of systems to the long-term pressures identified in the water White Paper, such as climate change, environmental pressures and population growth. It also requires Ofwat to ensure that the companies take action to meet the long-term needs of consumers by promoting appropriate long-term planning and investment; and by taking any and all relevant measures to manage water resources sustainably and reduce demand.
So let me assure the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, that I concur entirely with his aims. However, I consider his amendment to be unnecessary, because its effect would be to duplicate an identical existing provision in Section 2(5A) of the Water Industry Act 1991, which provides a definition of “consumers” for the purpose of the consumer duty. It clearly states that,
“‘consumers’ includes both existing and future consumers”.
I hope that this will satisfy the noble Lord and that he will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, for his support and agree with him that I was perhaps too dismissive in relation to the effect on Ofgem. Such a responsibility has had an effect on Ofgem and on the way in which its work, output and regulatory responsibilities are seen by the companies and consumers within the energy sector, so it has made a difference.
The arguments that the Minister has just put were very similar to those put initially by Energy Ministers in relation to the amendment to the 2008 Bill pursued by the noble Lords, Lord Oxburgh and Lord Redesdale. I cannot remember whether I openly supported them, but I certainly spoke to the then Minister—it was none other, I believe, than the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath—who agreed that the briefing that he had from his department was too negative and reflected the usual view of Whitehall that just because there were references to it in other documents you should not make it clear in the Bill. The Minister should perhaps go back to his own officials and say, “Well, yes, it may be that we can point to other documents, but people will look at the Bill”. They will look particularly at the front end of the Bill, if they get that far, which amends the 1991 Act—although that bit of it has not been amended yet by the Minister.
The role of future consumers is reflected very early on in the Bill in defining Ofwat’s responsibilities. The flexibility shown by Ministers in responding to the amendments to the 2008 Bill proposed by the noble Lords, Lord Oxburgh and Lord Redesdale, should be repeated here. Perhaps the Minister could agree to go back to his officials. I do not suppose that he will tell me that he is going to do that, so I will withdraw the amendment now and allow him time and grace to do that, because I would like to see this matter addressed on Report. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Baroness Parminter (LD)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Redesdale for raising this issue yet again. He has done so on numerous occasions, as have many other noble Lords. It is an important debate. It is quite clear that the Government are committed to sustainable development, but they believe that they do not need to elevate the primary duty of sustainable development for the regulator in the water industry because it has a secondary duty. What they are prepared to give is the new primary duty for resilience. I think we are going to carry on arguing about whether resilience delivers the environmental and social benefits that those of us who are concerned about sustainable development believe it does. The Government say it does and I am sure that the Minister will reiterate today that he believes that resilience will deliver the sustainable benefits that we believe are crucial for the regulator to deliver. There are others who believe that the resilience duty does not.
I would like to pick up on what my noble friend Lord Redesdale has said. We should try and move the debate on from arguing about what “sustainable development” and “resilience” mean to what we actually want to achieve. It is significant that my noble friend Lord Redesdale raised the issue of water efficiency. That is, bluntly, what we want to achieve—a more resilient future for our water industry which protects the scarce resources that we have, to the benefit of the environment and communities. I urge the Minister to reflect again between now and Report on a duty to promote water efficiency. I think that is a constructive way forward. There will be a difference between those of us who believe resilience is sufficient and those of us who would have liked to see a primary duty on the regulator. I do not think the Government are going to move, but I do think that a duty to look at the issue of water efficiency is a helpful way forward.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I have tabled an amendment in this group which attempts to deal in a slightly different way with exactly the same issue as the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale. Which is the closest approximation to perfection I am not entirely sure, and whether either of them is perfectible in the eyes of the Government, I am not entirely sure.
We do have an issue. The noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, stated the current situation correctly. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, that, since 2003, Ofwat has had a sustainable development responsibility but it is a secondary objective. What these amendments attempt to do is to put it on a par with the economic objective for consumers. There is an economic, a social and an environmental dimension of sustainability which goes wider than that responsibility to consumers, now and in the future. The reason why relations and general coherence are better than the early days which the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, described, is that Ofwat has recognised that it is more than an economic regulator, and the Environment Agency has recognised that it has economic objectives as well as environmental objectives. Some of those have become a little controversial in recent days, in that, for example, flood defence priorities are determined largely in terms of economic effect. Both agencies now have all three—certainly environmental and economic objectives—which they routinely integrate within their operations. For that reason it is slightly odd that there is a differential between the objectives to consumers on the economic side and the objectives of sustainability on the other side, in terms of Ofwat’s requirements. The Government have made two attempts at convincing those of us who are interested in this subject through some very well written briefs. They were much more understandable than the Bill itself, or indeed the Explanatory Notes. By and large, I understood those briefs; they have nevertheless failed to convince me. They are arguing in terms that are now obsolete. They argue that the economic regulator is Ofwat and the environmental regulator is the EA. They both overlap and they need to operate a coherent approach to this in relation to sustainability.
The Government have moved significantly, as the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, was hinting, in stretching the definition of “resilience”. Resilience is a jolly good, robust term. We all approve of resilience, and long-term resilience is clearly a responsibility of Ofwat and indeed the EA, in relation to water resources and their delivery. It is not quite the same as sustainability. It is part of sustainability but it is not the totality. The noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, have both pointed to the energy efficiency dimension, which, let us be fair, has been lacking until at least very recently in some of Ofwat’s priorities, when it allows expenditure during the price review. It is that which worries people—that this issue will fall out.
The Minister told me the other day that resilience includes social resilience; it presumably therefore includes issues of affordability and access as well as environmental and social issues. That may be so but the normal meaning of “resilience” is protection and upgrading of the assets that you have, and which need a long-term permanence to protect them. The Government are in danger of stretching the term rather beyond what the Oxford English Dictionary would term as resilience.
Health and Social Care Bill
Lord Whitty Excerpts(12 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Greaves
I echo everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, has just said. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, has raised some extremely important issues and hit some serious problems at the heart of the Bill. I am not sure that his solution is the right one, but it needs discussion. I am sorry that the noble Baroness, Lady Gould, in not in her place because she made the important point that the meaning of the phrase “public health” has evolved over the years. The core Public Health Act 1936 was about the role of local authorities in relation to public health and what we now call environmental health.
In the 1974 local government reorganisation, public health functions were split. Half went to the health service, the other half remained with local government, and the phrases “environmental health” and “environmental health officers” were largely invented at that time to distinguish the new environmental health service from what had previously been public health. Of course, in two-tier authorities environmental health is a function of the lower-tier authority.
The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, made a very important point. We have some amendments coming up, probably in a few hours’ time, when we will discuss this, so I will not say a great deal more about that now except to make the basic point that it is very important indeed that environmental health functions, which already rest with unitary authorities but in county and district areas will rest with district authorities, are properly integrated with the rest of the public health function.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, said, the things that environmental health officers and departments do are astonishingly varied. If a problem is clearly a public health or environmental health problem, they will find the expertise, go out and get expert advice if it does not exist within that authority, and tackle it. It is a very important function indeed. However, at the national level, environmental health, as defined in the Local Government Act 1974, rests with the Department for Communities and Local Government, not with the Department of Health. It probably ought to rest with the DCLG because it is very clearly a local government function, but again, at the national level, the Government need to take action to integrate it into the new, very important public health functions of the Secretary of State.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, as my noble friend Lord Rooker has said, I have an amendment in this group that is precisely the same as his, except that it was directed at a different point. My noble friend has made a strong case for this particular dimension of addressing environmental health issues, but there is also the wider issue of the lacuna in the Bill, as has been touched on. There is one major shift that the White Paper, the post-pause White Paper and now the Bill are driving for: the shift of public health, including environmental health, to local authorities. However, the Bill itself reflects very little of that. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, in response to the group of amendments before last, referred to the fact that work was being done on it and said that she hoped this would see the light of day fairly soon.
The establishment of Public Health England as part of the department-cum-executive agency is hardly reflected in this Bill at all. The issues that relate to the respective role of the local authorities, to which my noble friend Lord Greaves has referred, are not reflected in this Bill at all. We have a major shift, going back to pre-1974, that makes public health the responsibility of local authorities. We have a recent history in which all the expertise in environmental health departments has been seriously squeezed because the requirements are mostly non-statutory. EHOs have been diverted on to other issues. We are coming into a further famine of local authority funding. The local authorities will be receiving this new public health responsibility at a time when their total resources are being squeezed and restricted and other priorities are impinging.
Before this Bill completes its course, we need greater clarity on how public health and environmental health responsibilities are to be carried out; what the structure of them is going to be; what the co-ordination among local authorities, and from the centre to the local authorities, is going to be; what the exact role of Public Health England is going to be; and, frankly, at least some broad indication of how that is being resourced.
Lord Greaves
The noble Lord raised the question of funding. Does he agree that this will perhaps be exacerbated in two-tier areas because the ring-fenced public health funding will go to the top-tier authorities, whereas the environmental health functions will remain with the lower-tier authorities—which indeed are extremely squeezed on their funding because this is what we call “other services”, which are not regarded as a priority—and finding a way of getting some of that funding down to the lower-tier environmental health authorities is a question that needs to be looked at?
Lord Northbourne
My Lords, perhaps I may intervene now to ask the Minister to say, when he is winding up, what happens if the local authority does not do what it is supposed to do? It is not impossible. In fact, there is a great variety, as we sit here today, in the performance of local authorities. They are managed by elected members, who want to please their electorates, so there are all sorts of arguments for thinking that not every local authority is going to be very enthusiastic about these additional objectives.
Lord Whitty
My Lords, I will leave that question for the Minister, because it clearly raises wider issues. I totally agree with the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, that one of the most acute effects of all this will be at the district level, where the funds are less protected, and where there is already some difficulty and some serious variability in performance and resourcing.
Given the Government’s support for the establishment of a chief environmental health officer at the centre to help co-ordinate all these issues and—if you like—to punch the weight of environmental health in the other range of priorities which the Department of Health has to pursue, I would ask the Minister this. Will the assessment of public health and the ongoing process she described in trying to defend the Bill from not spelling this out in great detail, lists or no lists, be available to us before we complete the consideration of this Bill, the exact timescale of which looks ever lengthier? Nevertheless, before we reach final conclusions on this, we need to have greater clarity on the direction in which the Government are going on public health, and, I would argue, on environmental health in particular.
I shall mention one other issue that relates to this. The abolition of the HPA also has significant implications in this area. I intend to come back to this at a later stage, but some of the functions of what are currently statutory authorities are going to go to Public Health England, as I understand it, and there is some confusion there as to how that will be carried out, what authority those roles will have and what their local manifestations will be. Under the new structure we will have health protection units around the country. So that is just one more complication here. By Report we ought to have some greater clarity in the strategy of the Government. I ask the Minister to give us an indication of that.
Lord Rea
My Lords, I had not intended to intervene on this amendment, but just from memory, I can think of several areas where the presence of an environmental health officer at the centre would perhaps have speeded things up. The noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, alluded to air quality, but there are other examples as well. I am old enough to remember the smog of 1951 and the enormous benefit of the Clean Air Act which followed a few years later. I was also in your Lordships’ House when lead-free petrol was debated, and when that became law nationally. There is also the question of food safety—the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, will know all about this—particularly the BSE epidemic, when it became necessary to ban animal-sourced feed for ruminant animals. Again, that required national legislation. Local environmental health officers, who do a fantastically important job, would not have been able to deal with these things on a local basis.