Renewable Energy: Costs

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Thursday 14th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I appreciate the noble Lord, Lord Frost, starting this debate. He did so in the way I anticipated he would, repeating what was said in the debate a couple of weeks ago. Rather than following him into his arguments, the House needs to recognise that even if the costs of renewables, including of construction, carbon capture and storage and so forth, prove to be double the estimates made under the previous Government—and which are still supported by the Conservatives and by the new systems operator—they would still be substantially cheaper than the estimated cost of gas.

Of course, the electricity price in this country, contrary to what the noble Lord has said and to what the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, said the other week, is higher than in other countries at various points because it is based on the price of gas. We have to pay the world price for gas, which went up considerably. It does not matter whether the gas is from the North Sea or from overseas: that gas price determines our electricity supply. The mechanism is explicit and implicit.

The real problem with our attempt to move to net zero is that we have failed to do certain complementary things, and on that I would largely agree with the noble Lord. We have failed to develop storage, switching capacity and aspects of the grid. We have failed to provide an offshore grid so that different arrays and wind farms can land at one place, rather than creating a planning problem in different parts of the country. On the other hand, we have failed to develop nuclear power or to return to nuclear power early enough. We have also failed to develop the long-term investment in tidal and wind power, which we have plenty of around our coast and which would not be intermittent. But that is very different from denying the whole ability to provide at relatively cheap cost predominantly renewable energy and to get back on to the trajectory, around which there was a degree of political consensus a year or two ago.

There are other problems, as well, with the policy so far. Effectively, we have failed to produce a supply chain for renewable energy in this country to any great extent. Most of the blades and paraphernalia for wind farms come from abroad. I applaud the Prime Minister’s announcement a few days ago on investment in manufacturing blades in Hull. I hope that that is only part of a new industrial policy that takes into account the need to provide alternative employment through training, retraining and recruitment of those who hitherto worked in areas that were supportive of North Sea activity, so they have jobs in the new industry. The actual techniques used in the jobs are not that different, so retraining can relatively easily be done; but we also need a new generation who can support the renewable energy sector.

I do not think that the noble Lord makes the case for changing significantly our trajectory, but he does make the case for ensuring that these back-up arrangements are in place and provide jobs and income for this country’s businesses and workforce.

The other reason I put down my name for this debate is my deep anxiety that, while it is obviously right to query costs, particular technologies and their effect on employment and business within Britain, what are essentially queries about particular projects—whether on who pays for it, the environmental impact of, for example, solar farms on agricultural land, or the total cost—have been used by some people to support what appears to be a growing international degree of ending the consensus on climate change. Some of that is reflected in what is going on in Baku now and the near failure of the COP process so far. We need to get back to that consensus, with all-party support for the trajectory that, a few years ago, seemed to be agreed by us all.

Industrial Strategy

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Thursday 1st February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I offer congratulations to my noble friend Lord Watson on securing this debate, and a warm welcome to the noble Lord, Lord Rosenfield—I appreciated his speech.

Arguably, the biggest failure of the British economy over several decades now has been that we face a falling share of global investment in industry in its widest sense, including the service and digital industries. That means we have to have the confidence of investors—and by “investors” I mean everybody from the boards of multinational companies, those who run the great sovereign funds which decide where the money goes, those who run private equity firms and, indeed, those who run the more mundane pension schemes and the ordinary Joe who has a few shares. They all want to invest and they take the risk to invest, but one of the essential contradictions of capitalism—of which there are a few—is that those who earn their money by taking risks actually require a degree of certainty. That applies to investors of all sorts. I remember industrial policies, or whatever they were called at the time, from Harold Wilson onwards, and none of them lasted long enough, none of them was clear enough and none of them convinced the investors of the world that Britain was the place to invest. It was different in other countries, as my noble friend Lord Watson said.

Over the past 48 hours, I have met three sectors of business. All of them are operating under what may be a high-level industrial strategy: the pathway to net zero. Each told me the same thing, in effect. I met the nuclear industry, which has suffered over decades through changes to industrial policy when it needs a real, long-term environment. I met the automotive industry, which is now committed to moving away from fossil fuel-powered vehicles but sees the Government changing dates and not giving enough certainty there. And I met the new sector of carbon capture and storage, which will be another vital sector in delivering net zero but needs greater certainty from government; it has already had two false starts in developing technology where we could have been world leaders.

We need an industrial strategy that provides certainty both to investors and to the future workforce that we hope to recruit and benefit from. It needs to be a just and fair transition—fair to workers and to different parts of the country. That means it has to involve an effective medium-term to long-term policy for training, including the retraining of existing staff and the training of future generations. We will have to take the workforce, including the trade unions, on board in this; we will also have to take those who are in different parts of the country into consideration in developing the strategy.

But a long-term strategy is what we need. We have not had it properly and we need it even more desperately now.

Climate Change

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Monday 24th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for his introduction and attention to this issue, on which he is always clear and relates all the different effects of climate change. I am afraid I cannot be quite so complimentary about the contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Frost. The idea that we have a choice between mitigation and adaptation is absurd. We need both. As to the current furore in the newspapers over the weekend, after a by-election in which 250 people voted the wrong way, there is pressure on the leaders of our two main parties to back off from their commitment to green policies and tackling climate change. I find that absolutely absurd. I hope that the leaders of both parties will resist it, and I believe they will.

In Glasgow 18 months ago, Britain was seen to be taking a lead on reductions in fossil fuels. Commitments to adaptation were less clear, but nevertheless they were there. There was a minimalist contribution by rich nations to help the adaptation of more vulnerable, usually poorer, nations. Since then, we have gone backwards as a country in terms of UK leadership and as a globe as whole. The recent Climate Change Committee report—the last from the noble Lord, Lord Deben, and I pay tribute to his work and look forward to what he has to say—clearly shows, as do the other reports referred to, that Britain is not on track to achieve net zero or to have adapted to the warmer, more dangerous world that will ensue, and nor is the world on that check.

We have seen the results in heatwaves, high temperatures, wildfires, melting ice caps and disappearing glaciers. Sea temperatures and levels rise, while at the same time we have seen a loss of reliable rainfall and fresh water. We will now not, frankly, meet the target of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees—the Paris target. Nor will we restrain it to 2 degrees. The more off course we are for mitigating global warming, the more essential is the need to prioritise and pay for adaptation, with significant investment and major economic and societal behaviour change. The longer we continue to burn fossil fuels, drive diesel cars and cut down trees, the more expensive and difficult that adaptation becomes.

For some countries, adaptation is an existential requirement. Low-lying islands such as the Maldives and some Caribbean and Pacific nations will disappear unless we adapt as well as mitigate. Yet the already inadequate Glasgow commitments made by richer nations have failed to materialise. Here in Britain, we need a focus on flood defence. We need to be prepared to designate which land we will have to abandon, yet we are still building on floodplains. For this city of London, we need to start assessing the cost and the need for a second Thames barrier. We need to be building net-zero homes, yet the Government have abandoned those regulations.

Adaptations mean not only major infrastructure expenditure and commitment but societal change in our behaviour. The Environment and Climate Change Committee of your Lordships’ House, on which I sit, produced a report a few months ago in which we looked at changes in relation to food, energy and transport. I will not go over those, but they are all needed. At the moment, we are so far off the net-zero trajectory that we have little chance of limiting climate change. We need early focus on adaptation. The recent adaptation report from the sub-committee chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge, who is not in her place, indicates that early adaptation investment could, as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said, give 10 times as much benefit later on and avoid additional expenditure. And yet we have the present pressure on today’s leaders and commitments by the major parties to back off from their policies.

[Lord Mott (Con)]

My Lords, we need to keep speeches to four minutes please.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I listened to the “Thought for the Day” programme this morning, where the theologian likened the politicians’ retreat to the position of St Augustine. But, in this context, “not yet” is too late.

Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 15th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Krebs (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to the cross-party Amendment 48 in my name and those of the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Hayman of Ullock, and the noble Lord, Lord Duncan of Springbank. As always, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Caithness; he gave me a namecheck in his speech which I hope to add to my CV, so that for my next job application I can say, “As quoted by the noble Earl, Lord Caithness”.

I support in large part what he said about the importance of rigorous scientific evidence to underpin policy—he referred to the environment, but I would say more broadly. I will add a note of caution from my personal experience. As many noble Lords will know, I was responsible for instigating the randomised badger culling trials, the so-called “Krebs trials”, which were meant definitively to determine whether killing badgers was a good way of controlling bovine tuberculosis. The trial was probably the largest ecological experiment ever done in this country; it did produce results, but it did not settle the arguments or the policy. So science has an important role to play, and I support the noble Earl’s amendment, but we must recognise that political decisions come in as well.

I turn now to Amendment 48. I want to keep it brief so I will say what it is not and what it is. It is not an attempt to block any change. It is also not an alternative to the earlier proposals that came from my noble and learned friend Lord Hope of Craighead to involve Parliament in future decisions. It is not either of those. It supports the Government in their declared ambitions for the environment and for food. In doing so, it also ensures that the Government make good decisions rather than bad decisions. The amendment is about protecting the environment and consumer interests in relation to food.

These two areas—food and environment—are crucial to the REUL Bill, as between them they account for approximately half of the 4,900 regulations that come under REUL according to the current dashboard. At its board meeting in December 2022, the Food Standards Agency noted 800 items related to food and feed. The REUL dashboard reports about 1,700 items related to Defra, most of which concern environmental protection. These two areas are also crucial because of public concern. You have to think only of sewage in rivers, outbreaks of food-borne illness or GM foods to realise that these areas—environment and food—resonate with the public. These two areas also attracted a great deal of debate from your Lordships in Committee.

The amendment that I have proposed has three elements: first, non-regression—which we have already heard about from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle. Any future changes, according to Amendment 48, should not reduce or water down current levels of environmental protection or food safety standards. Nor should they contravene any international agreements to which the UK has committed.

My second point is expert input. This resonates with the amendment in the name of the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. Regulations should not be changed without consulting the relevant experts. These should include the Office for Environmental Protection, the Food Standards Agency and their cognate bodies in Scotland.

The third element is transparency. The amendment would require the Government to publish a report showing how any changes do not reduce environmental or food protections and what advice was received from the experts consulted. As a further transparency measure, the amendment also requires the Food Standards Agency, together with Food Standards Scotland, to report on the impact of any changes resulting from the implementation of this Bill on food safety and other consumer interests in relation to food.

The proposals in these three areas—non-regression, expert advice and transparency—are totally in line with the Government’s own commitments. They have said over and over again that they do not want to weaken environmental protection or compromise food safety and standards. The noble Lord, Lord Benyon, who I am delighted to see is going to respond to this grouping, has himself said that on more than one occasion in your Lordships’ House. This amendment simply formalises these commitments in the Bill. As we heard earlier, Clauses 13, 14, 16 and 17 leave Ministers a great deal of discretionary power. While, of course, we totally trust current Ministers to keep their word, who knows who will be in charge in future? This amendment will ensure that, in the future, Governments will build on the good work that has been done up to now and the promises that have been made.

Outside this House, who supports this amendment? Let me give noble Lords some examples. I asked the Food and Drink Federation whether it supported the food parts of this amendment. The FDF, with more than 1,000 members ranging from global brands to innovative start-ups, represents the UK’s largest manufacturing sector. It says in writing that it is happy to be quoted as supporting this amendment. If the Government wish to be business friendly—and I have heard that said—here is a good place to start: accept an amendment that has the weight of nearly half a million jobs behind it.

Equally, non-regression of environmental protections is supported by the Government’s statutory advisers, the Office for Environmental Protection and the Climate Change Committee, which both said in recent written statements that it is important that the REUL Bill includes a non-regression clause.

The amendment applies to the whole of the UK, and in that context it is noteworthy that the Scottish Government have also written to express their support for Amendment 48.

I hope that in this brief introduction I have said enough to convince your Lordships that this amendment is sensible, proportionate and fully supportive of the Government’s declared commitments on the environment and food. Indeed, I cannot see why on earth the Government would not accept it, and I very much look forward to the Minister agreeing with me. However, if that agreement is not forthcoming, and recognising from Committee that there was widespread support from across the House for the areas of environmental and food protections, I will wish to test the opinion of the House.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I have the third amendment in this group, Amendment 49. Colleagues will have detected that there is a considerable overlap with the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and I was proposing to withdraw my amendment formally in favour of his. He has moved that very ably, and therefore I need not repeat most of the arguments he made.

It is very important, now we have the Joint Committee procedure and all the other changes that the amendments in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, have built into the Bill, that we give some guidance as to how they are to proceed. In relation to issues of the environment and food, the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, would make it clear how in part they are to receive guidance on carrying out that function.

I will add just one point to the considerations your Lordships have already heard from the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. These areas are very important for our trade agreements. Environmental standards increasingly appear in our trade agreements, particularly with the EU but with other countries as well. Therefore, any regression of those standards needs to be clear not just from an environmental but from a trade point of view. It is absolutely clear that this must be the case for food. We have an important food manufacturing and agricultural industry, which needs to ensure that the standards to which it produces are the same as or equivalent to those of our trading partners. If that is not the case, some of our best trade agreements will be precarious. The references to international standards and international bodies of advice are very important for the proposed Joint Committee to follow. I therefore hope that those considerations can be taken into account by the House and that the Government will accept the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Krebs.

Procurement Bill [HL]

Lord Whitty Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 25th May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, like others, I thank the Minister for his meticulous introduction to this Bill. It is also a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Maude. His vast experience as a Minister and an adviser to successive Governments in the public procurement area is important to us, as is his contention that it is not just the law that is important. However, the law does set the context, and that is what we are debating today.

As has been explained, this Bill is supposed to be part of the Brexit dividend, replacing a complex and allegedly heavy-handed EU system and the four sets of regulations transposed into British law into one single place. I am not sure that a Bill of 115 clauses, 11 sections and umpteen possibilities of secondary legislation is quite the simplification that is sometimes claimed.

Together with the Subsidies Control Act, which we passed a few weeks ago, the Bill, in effect, redefines the formal contractual interface between the private sector and the various aspects of the state. It is bound to be complicated; it is at least as complicated as the EU system. In some senses, it is actually more complicated. I welcome the intentions of the Bill, but I regret, as I will come to, the watering down of some of the intentions that were in the earlier consultative process.

I have a few preliminary questions about the Bill. First, in the EU, the public contracts operation was overseen and enforced by the Commission, which had a degree of independence from the wrangles on the Council of Ministers and, indeed, from the mainstream activity of the Commission itself. It was not entirely immune from that, for obvious reasons, but it had a clear authority. Who is the authority in enforcing this and in ensuring that the umpteen public authorities abide by it and that companies understand it? In the Subsidies Control Act, there is an authority for the CMA. There is no central authority so far—that I can discern—in this Bill.

Secondly, we have to accept that there is a degree to which this is more ambitious than the EU system was. The main aim of the EU system was to ensure that companies in member states had equal access to procurement in member states. It ensured that the contracting and bidding processes went through an EU-defined system, but it did not actually put an obligation on the member states that their contract content should be exactly the same and go through similar processes and similar forms. This Bill goes further in that direction, with the contracts that are going to be extended by public authorities, the devolved Administrations—importantly—and local authorities, and in the actual content of the contracts themselves. So the Bill is actually more ambitious than the EU system in some ways, and goes a long way to defining the contract form itself. It applies to all public authorities within England, Wales and Northern Ireland—but not Scotland. This in itself raises a number of questions if Scottish companies, for example, bid for English-based or Welsh-based contracts.

It also raises certain questions in Northern Ireland. I do not want to go into the morass of the protocol but, because the single market provisions apply in Northern Ireland to a degree, that complicates the system in terms of Northern Ireland adopting it.

I welcome many of the approaches in the Bill. I particularly welcome, as did my noble friend Lady Hayman, the shift away from “best economically advantageous” to simply “most advantageous”. That is an important signal, but it is not necessarily followed through. It reflects the representations of many groups that the interests in various levels and types of public sector contracts go well beyond minimising the immediate cost to the taxpayer, the ratepayer and the businesses funding the public authority. Value for money, however, is still seen as the prime objective and is defined in pretty narrow terms.

In reality, local authorities, for example, would need to consider not only the cost minimisation and the cost of delivery of what are the defined aims of a particular contract but the wider economic effects on their communities and local business, and the environmental effect on their areas and beyond. That goes beyond the normal understanding of value for money.

I mention a few of those wider social value issues—the noble Lord, Lord Maude, referred to the social value of legislation—that need to be taken into account in awarding state public authority contracts. They include overseeing the list of potential contractors, including overseas contractors—which I shall come back to. These social value issues also include an environmental dimension, I suggest—especially climate change and greenhouse gas emissions—local preference issues for local companies and local employment, human rights issues, employment rights issues, and accessibility to public services.

The Bill also needs to recognise much more explicitly some of the general points that were made in the consultation and have been made again today. For example, the transparency provisions are not particularly strong and the relationship between transparency and the proposed digital system needs to be spelled out. Accountability and probity in public office need to be emphasised and explicit. We have had a number of recent issues in which probity in public office and the appropriateness of the awarding of contracts have been seriously questioned and suggestions of cronyism made.

Public procurement accounts for roughly 15% of all carbon emissions, and the public benefit of taking into account carbon emissions in the procurement process needs to be reflected in the Bill. That means that tenders which might otherwise be attractive can be rejected if there is a negative impact on carbon emissions, and potential contractors can be excluded if their record on the carbon front is poor. To be safe, that needs to appear in statute. It appears in the national policy statement—well, the draft of it—but, of course, that is not statute.

Likewise, on local preference, it must be possible for local authorities and devolved Administrations to give a degree of preference to local companies—SMEs, start-ups and social enterprises in particular—and for the creation of local employment, and for national public bodies to give preference to UK-based companies in certain respects. In Committee on the then Subsidy Control Bill, I asked whether any such local preference would be classified as a subsidy under the post-Brexit state aid rules. I never received a clear answer and I shall ask again now in relation to this Bill. Will local or national preference be accepted as a public benefit under these new and complex post-Brexit rules?

On human rights and employment rights, I think I heard the Minister say that the Bill will allow the exclusion of potential bidders on the ground of their human rights record—but I should like him to repeat it. For example, on employment rights, would P&O, in view of its recent behaviour, now be excluded from contracts for the development of freeports?

The international dimension here is also important. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, referred to, we exclude Chinese companies from certain security and communications-based contracts, but does that apply to individual public authorities and their contracts, and other Chinese companies, on similar grounds? Does that require a national policy or can local authorities take their own decisions?

In a more contentious area, I have noticed that the Government have told local authorities and other public bodies that they cannot, for example, ban Israeli companies from their contract lists. I make no comment on the rights and wrongs of that argument, but it indicates that there is a clear, public, national policy on the issue. How does this apply now to, for example, Qatari companies, in view of what we know about their treatment of employees and employment rights in preparation for the World Cup? Would a local authority now be penalised for deleting a Qatari company from that list on those grounds? There must be hundreds of similar examples.

I briefly mention one other point: accessibility. I hope the Minister has seen the submission from the RNIB on this issue, but it is important that the Bill reflects the need for public contracts to take account of their effect on those who are disabled. I hope that is one aspect that can be reflected. It was referred to in the consultation and now needs to be reflected in the Bill. These are a few of the issues that I hope we can explore further at later stages. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Net-zero Emissions Target

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Monday 11th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, as I said earlier, I cannot speak for the spending review or the Budget. However, we will not be seeking to inadvertently encourage excess use of aviation travel. But again, it is a very vital part of our economy and, until other forms of transport take its place, we need to support it.

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, it is, frankly, widely believed in both business and environmental circles that the Treasury is at best lukewarm about using fiscal measures to support the climate change strategy. If that is not the case, why has the Treasury not used the supposed freedom post Brexit to remove VAT from building refurbishment, thus continuing to incentivise high-carbon demolition and disincentivise refurbishment and retrofit?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I respectfully disagree with the noble Lord’s view of the Treasury’s position. I mentioned the emissions trading scheme that was announced earlier this year. We have published the Industrial Decarbonisation Strategy, which sets out the vision for a low-carbon industrial sector by 2050. In March this year we were the first G7 country to agree a landmark North Sea transition to support the oil and gas industry’s transition to clean energy. Through this deal, the sector has committed to cut emissions by 50% by 2030. The Treasury is closely involved in all these initiatives.

Health and Social Care Levy Bill

Lord Whitty Excerpts

2nd reading & Order of Commitment discharged & 3rd reading
Monday 11th October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, it is of course a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, but also to underline that what he has bequeathed to his successor is no answer to this problem, and he is now asking the Minister to provide at the end of this debate an answer which he and his many predecessors failed to provide.

I am totally convinced that the social care system has been chronically underfunded for decades and that the NHS itself requires very substantial increases, not just because of coronavirus but because of earlier underfunding and mis-funding. I am therefore at one with the noble Lord, Lord Macpherson, that we do need a significant tax rise, but I strongly object to this Bill. I object to its ill-thought-out basis; its misuse and possible distortion of the national insurance system; its regressive burden and unfairness, in terms of its impact on low-paid workers, jobs and the young; its jobs-threatening impositions on employers; and its ambivalence on whether this is a temporary or permanent structure for our taxation system, with its half-baked and probably temporary hypothecation.

I also object, and here I follow my noble friend Lord Lipsey, to the way in which this House has been asked to consider the Bill. This has been designated a money Bill, but behind it is an enormous political and policy issue: it is not just about our resources; it is about what we are going to do with those resources. The House of Commons was asked in a day to pass the Bill, in both senses, and we are not really allowed to vote on it. This is treating Parliament with contempt. It is also treating the public with contempt, as well as those of us who are supposed to benefit from this increase in resources, and those who are expected to pay for it. I do not think we should be party to that. Unfortunately, given its designation, we have no means of not being party to it.

I take one phrase from the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, much of whose speech I totally agree with—I also agree with, rather more than I expected, the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and with the masterly speech by my noble friend Lord Eatwell—that we cannot agree wholeheartedly to a Bill before we have seen the menu. That is what we are being asked to do today.

Behind all this is the fact that social care has been underfunded, staff are underpaid and service quality is rarely checked. Residential care is paid for in a variety of different—mainly unjust—ways, principally by individuals and their families through self-funding and unpaid care, but also by local government and the NHS regarding the nursing component. It is a mess. Care workers attending the clients’ own homes are subject to intolerable time regimes, their pay is awful, their management is awful and the visit diaries mean that those who really need sustained care rarely get it. The Covid epidemic has made this much worse.

Similarly, the NHS has been subject to severe cuts and constant reorganisations, but it has always been financed by general taxation. The tax proposed in this Bill is termed a “levy”. Normally the term “levy” suggests that we are addressing a temporary problem—it may be a big one such as a war, but nevertheless a temporary problem—but this must be resolved on a long-term basis. The genesis of this proposition is interesting. Originally the proposition was to raise money for social care but somehow it has been hijacked by the absolute necessity to find very substantial sums of money for the NHS. The bulk of the money is, rather peculiarly, to be raised on the basis of national insurance not general taxation, but the proceeds will go into the general fund.

As the noble Lord, Lord Macpherson, said, hypothecation is usually a dirty word in the Treasury, yet the mandarins have somehow been convinced that it is sensible to apply it to this. I am not against that in principle, but I wonder how a complete shift in Treasury ideology, a muddled basis of taxation and a lack of clarity as to how long this will persist give us a proper way of forward planning. I have a theory about why this was done. My noble friend Lord Lipsey pointed out that the Royal Commission on which he notably sat and many think tanks, commissions and inquiries since then, including Andrew Dilnot’s, have looked at this in detail. Some of those proposals have been half-baked, some pretty good, some partly good. Some have raised the issue of basing social care on a national social insurance basis. This is leverage. This is an old idea rethought. My feeling is that part of what the Prime Minister so wildly committed to, in resolving social care once and for all, was some of these ideas, which were floating around in circles in which he moved but were in reports he hardly read, which included a social insurance principle. This was regurgitated, therefore, in this form in this Bill when the Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Health realised that they need an answer to some of these issues. However, instead of it going into social care and making social care part of social security, it was hijacked and used for the very pressing and important needs of the national health service.

This is not a way to operate. The committee of the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, provided a much sounder basis for proceeding in relation to social care. The issue of the integration of social care and the health service has been with us for a long time. Like the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, I mean integration not necessarily of institutions but of policy. This does not resolve the issue at all; it simply doles out the bulk of the money to one part and a little bit left over to the other.

The Bill is not about a sensible plan for bringing NHS and care services together, nor about putting both on a social insurance basis. It is about avoiding putting up income tax or profits tax contrary to the Conservative Party manifesto. It is about not depriving wealthier families of the inheritance of their parents’ homes to pay for when they have to go into a care home. Frankly, it is about putting the burden on lower-paid workers and small employers, who will disproportionately be paying the cost.

What started out as a vaguely half-decent strategic idea for social care has ended up in a bodge, and one that I think will boomerang on this Government. I plead with the Government that there is time to think again—not much time, but time to devise both a financially viable long-term social care system, which may or may not be based to some degree on social insurance, and to find the undoubtedly much-needed money for the NHS, but in a much less regressive manner. We need a long-term plan for health and social security, not a thin White Paper that just tells us how much it will cost us when we do not know what it is. We need a strategy whose cost is based on everyone contributing according to their means. We can thereby ensure that people get the benefit according to their needs.

Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill [HL]

Lord Whitty Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 25th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I commend the persistence and drive of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, on getting this measure considered for the statute book.

The short-term thinking of generations of politicians, business leaders and financiers has left an appalling problem for our grandchildren and future generations. On one level, we have recognised this. For example, this week we have been debating the Environment Bill and we have had the report of the Climate Change Committee. But that just reveals that, although we set ambitious targets for greenhouse gases and sustainable development goals, we have not put in place the means of actually delivering the way to deal with problems inherited from our generation—and it is indeed our generation and, perhaps, the generation immediately before it that has created these problems.

Eighty per cent of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have been generated in my lifetime, and 60% since global powers formally recognised the problem at the Rio conference. On the social side, also, problems of inequality—between and within countries—over- population and failure to tackle social ills, such as mental health and social care, have also been inherited from previous generations but have been aggravated by our failure to deal with them. The Bill aims to mitigate that, in an apparently modest bid—but, in mindset terms, a revolutionary change—to ensure that all decisions on projects and policies take into account the interests of future generations.

One apparently minor point concerns me. It sounds bureaucratic and technical, but it concerns discount rates, time preference presumptions and the Treasury’s Green Book rules. It runs through not only the psychology of our decision-making process, focusing on the short-term, but the technical process itself. For much of the key areas of decisions taken in recent decades whose inheritance we are now living with—from the 1970s to the 2010s, say—the official Treasury bill discount rate was never below 5%, usually at about 8% and sometimes as high as 15%. That mechanism was itself a major inhibitor of longer-term thinking, and we are living with the results.

We are now, since the financial crisis, in an era of low interest rates and low discount rates—below 1% at the moment—but that will almost certainly not persist beyond recovery from this pandemic. Can we, therefore, find a new mechanism that runs through our processes, so that we no longer discount future long-term benefits but begin to prioritise their interests and the interests of future generations?

When the noble Lord, Lord Bird, presented his earlier Bill, the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord True, objected that this just meant another quango, another parliamentary committee and another tick box, but this is so much more than a tick-box exercise; it is a whole new way of taking decisions. It will, regrettably, take time to bed in. The Welsh Government have made a commendable start, but they recognise that they have a long way to go. We have not even made that start; let us begin to do so today.

Budget Statement

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Friday 12th March 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I have a few key questions for the Minister and the Chancellor, because the answers do not exactly spring from the pages of the glossy Budget document, nor from the Minister’s own speech. However, there are some rather worrying hints from the OBR.

First, on post-Brexit trade with the EU, this morning we saw how dire the fall in trade during January was, in both directions, even when grace periods are still operating. However, it is more important to focus on the medium term. Last week, we also saw an authoritative study from the LSE predicting that UK-EU exports will fall by one-third in the medium term. What proportion of pre-Brexit exports for goods, food and services do the Government believe will be the settled post-pandemic level?

On jobs and work patterns, post lockdown, do the Government assume that we will all revert to the status quo or will there continue to be substantial working at home or hybrid working? If so, what are the implications for our city centres, because empty offices hit retail and hospitality outlets hard? What proportion of those currently on furlough are likely to get their jobs back, or do the Government believe that the largely lower-paid jobs which have been vacated by EU citizens going home will be filled by newly unemployed UK citizens and residents?

On public services, Covid has thrown up a number of social crises that would normally have to be handled by local services—social care, mental health, housing, education and family breakdown. How can local authorities pick up these responsibilities if, of all sectors, it is to be the sector hit most harshly by the revival of austerity problems and policies, as the Chancellor now threatens, with the most disadvantaged areas hit hardest?

Lastly and most vitally, what is the estimated net effect of all Budget measures on UK global emissions of greenhouse gases? A number of things that could have been done in this Budget were not. Meanwhile, I welcome all the new Members to the House and thank them for their maiden speeches.

Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland: Border Controls

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Thursday 4th February 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I underline what I said in my first Answer. It is clearly hugely disappointing and surprising to many that the EU proposed to take such a significant step without any notification—indeed, without even notifying the Irish Government. I profoundly agree with my noble friend that it now behoves us all to take appropriate and lasting action to address the questions of concern.

[Lord Whitty (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, Michael Gove has said that the problems with the protocol are not just teething problems. What did he mean by that? Does he now recognise that the protocol was a flawed document in many ways but that repudiation would be a political disaster and, indeed, a longer period of grace on its own would not resolve the problems? What is needed now is not a blame game but an intense period of co-operation between the officials of all four jurisdictions to make the total system work, north-south and east-west.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I agree that we need practical and urgent action. I certainly do not engage in any blame game; I simply draw attention to the fact that it was the EU that invoked Article 16.