Economy: Growth

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Thursday 31st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, I am left wishing that I spoke more languages than I do.

That politics and sustainable economic growth are uneasy partners comes out of this debate very strongly. They do not fit well together. As the noble Lord, Lord Hollick, who introduced this debate, said:

“Much is promised, but little is delivered”.

As the noble Lord, Lord Kestenbaum, said, innovation has been and remains the key to the advance of science and technology. Of course, Governments are always behind the curve. They do not keep up with the front line of innovation. The noble Lord, Lord Hollick, took us back to Neddy, the late Lord George-Brown and 265 million tonnes of coal, if I remember rightly.

At the time, I was working for a medium-sized business that made pithead gear, mine car circuits, skip-winding plants and coal washery plants. We made a lot of them. I suspect that the average life of those plants as against the predicted and perfectly feasible life would not be better than half. They went out of commission one after another when they were still in totally good working order. As the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, reminded us in an interesting speech a week ago, Governments are really only good at scene setting. We need good technical education, as the noble Lord, Lord Newby, said, good roads, as the noble Lord, Lord Hamilton, said, and low taxes, but please keep out of the clockwork. Indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, said that Governments should always keep out of the clockwork because they do not understand the front line; they have never been in the front line, he said. That may be going a little bit far.

I was allegedly in command of a steel foundry in Stockton-on-Tees, where I was given good tips on which horse was going to win that afternoon. I was a part-time marriage counsellor. Steel foundries are quite dangerous. We used to take the factory inspector as close to the furnace as we could in order to minimise his visits. We did not have a serious hospital-type accident for the whole time I was there. The workforce kept me out of danger much more than I did them. As the noble Lord, Lord Sugar, said, we have arrived at a dependency culture, which means that we think that everybody else should solve our problems and perhaps we should not solve them ourselves.

That leads me, finally, to a health warning. The Government offer a lot of schemes. Governments always have. They say: “If you do this, you will get this grant at the end of the process”. I have suffered from these schemes for many years, but they never include a health warning. The health warning should say: “Please remember that when you apply for a government-based grant it is coming out of public money. It has come from the taxpayer and must be handled very carefully. You should calculate the amount and cost of time that it will take you to apply. When you have done that, double it”.