Occupational and Personal Pension Schemes (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2018

Debate between Viscount Eccles and Lord Deben

Tuesday 15th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

Over how many weeks would the noble Lord suggest that the consultation should take place?

[Lord Deben]

My noble friend is right to say that the problem with all this legislation is that it takes time. If you are going to make fundamental changes, you have to face it: it is better to have short consultation periods in which everyone is told that there is a consultation, rather than this egregious kind of concept where you say, “We have had a bit of a consultation and we have ongoing talks”. We cannot get up in this House and say that we have had a consultation that shows that we have covered everything. I agree with my noble friend that you have to have a short consultation but it must be public and clear. It is frankly not our fault that we have lost a lot of time. It is because the Government did not start two years ago to prepare for what might be a no-deal exit.

Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Bill

Debate between Viscount Eccles and Lord Deben

Monday 12th January 2015 Grand Committee

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, there is one amendment to Clause 21 in this group. If the Committee will allow me, I will raise a rather general point about Clause 21. This impact report is a very big exercise, which is made quite complicated because it is selective; that is to say, it is supposed to concentrate only on regulations that have been introduced and withdrawn during the period. I am not looking for an answer on the general approach today, but perhaps my noble friend will be kind enough to write to the Committee about this clause.

This business impact target will be very expensive to carry out. I would particularly like to know how many people, over what period of time, will be engaged upon writing this annual report. Quite apart from that, its conclusions will be disputed, which will give rise to a lot more toing and froing. I wonder what will be achieved and what will be done as a result of this report that would not be done on a case-by-case basis anyway. That is to say, circumstances would arise as regards a particular regulation or the withdrawal of it, which would cause people to think that something must be done. Indeed, we have been discussing quite a complicated and comprehensive system for being able to raise such problems and deal with them. Therefore, before the next stage I would be most grateful to understand in more detail than I do what the real benefit is of Clause 21.

[Lord Deben]

My Lords, having been critical of what I am afraid I referred to as persiflage in an earlier amendment, I draw my noble friend’s attention to the importance of this set of amendments. They are not here, as I understand it, to lay extra burdens on anybody or to make generalised statements about good will and family life. In fact, they are designed very purposely to ask the Government to be very clear about this issue.

I say to my noble friend that it is important for the Government to be very clear about this position, because there are a number of other areas in which the Government have not been clear and where we are now in some difficulty. Of course I would not be out of order were I to speak to the question of caste at any length, but there is no doubt that there are a series of issues where lack of clarity has led people to be concerned as to where the Government stand. I am not concerned about that, because I am quite sure that the Government stand in the right place—you could not expect me to sit on this side of the Room if I did not think that. However, there are those who are not entirely sure, and this would be a good opportunity to give them the assurance that they need, not only for the high-minded view that the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, put forward and which she is perfectly right to raise, on the standing within the international community, but also for a rather boring local reason. That is that one of the problems of red tape, as I said, is the perception of it, and one of the other problems is the misunderstanding, and not knowing where it is.

I do not like the term “deregulation” much, as it presupposes that the answer in all questions is not to have regulation, while in my view we have to try to look for good regulation. That is what Governments of all parties mean, when they are sensible, whatever they say outside. One of the ways we can have good regulation is, first of all, to have clear regulation—people know where they are. That is why I am so keen on not having too much of it, not because I do not want regulation, but simply because the more you have of it, the less people are clear and the less they know what they should be doing. In this particular case, clarity seems crucially important.

Although this is clearly a probing amendment that is meant to try to make sure that the Government say what they think and, if it is necessary to put that in the Bill or change one of the clauses in such a way as to make that explanation certain, I am sure that the Government will find a way to do that. I wanted to emphasise that this seems to be a totally different kind of discussion from the one that I rather light-heartedly drew attention to earlier on—I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, if he felt that I had been unfair about what he said. However, on this occasion it is important that there should be absolute clarity.

Public Bodies Bill [HL]

Debate between Viscount Eccles and Lord Deben

Monday 7th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben]

I say to my noble friend that I have never claimed that bishops should live in these palaces. I do not want them to live in these palaces. The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, thinks that, but that is not my argument. My argument is that the Church of England has a specific role in our society which involves accepting that it has a duty of care of that which it largely has received and did not itself create; someone else created it and it was handed on. The fact is that the Church of England has failed. Of course, it does not sell the churches; no one wants to buy medieval churches; it sells the things it can make money out of. Therefore, I unhesitatingly say that it will be very much better for the Church of England if a Minister were able to remind it of its duty, not just to the moment, not just to the future, but to the past, and its role, dependent on the fact that it is the Church of England; and if it forgets that, many of us will have to change our minds about its place here and in the establishment.

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, I do not want to detain the House for a long time and I shall not. My noble friend Lord Deben has gone too far, as he did when he did not renew me as chairman of the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. He came to a very bad judgment about that and I entirely support the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester in his thesis.

I make one practical point about the Zurbaráns in Auckland Castle. The Church Commissioners are responsible for £5 billion worth of financial and property assets. The income from that funds 16 per cent of the church’s expenditure. The other 84 per cent comes, largely, from the congregations of the church and from, as the right reverend Prelate said, appeals for repairs and appeals for lead for the roof which needs renewing and so on. I think that the Church Commissioners and the church should take account of two things as they consider the position of the Zurbaráns. They need the support of their congregations. I do not think that it is certain that they will get £15 million for the Zurbaráns. The last time that this came up, as the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bishop Auckland, will remember, the Bowes Museum got an estimate from the market—not from Christie's or Sotheby's—and quoted £6 million, not £15 million or £20 million, which I think was the Sotheby's quote. So there is an issue about the risk which the Church Commissioners are taking with these pictures, which has nothing to do with the romantic story of Bishop Trevor, and that one of the pictures is a copy by Mr Pond for 24 guineas and the other pictures cost 21 guineas each. That is a very romantic story that has all the connotations of the disabilities of the Jews and all those things.

However, if the congregation in the north-east supported a solution which meant that the Church Commissioners could add on, shall I say, £12 million to £5 billion, you could say that that is likely to be a good judgment, not a bad one. With respect to the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, I do not think that the church has to hang on to every asset. One could suggest that it sells the divorce papers of Henry VIII from Catherine of Aragon, which sit in the library in Lambeth Palace. I do not know how much they would make, but I would guess quite a lot of money.

We should not get tremendously excited about this. It is a practical issue, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester has presented it to us. It is full of practical judgments, but the church needs the support of its congregations. I say rather quietly that in the north-east, there is the Dean of Durham—I remind the House that there is no Bishop of Durham at the moment. Durham Cathedral has an appeal out now. Are the Church Commissioners absolutely certain that they will not lose by raising £12 million and having an income of £360,000 a year—the Church Commissioners’ assets yield 3 per cent—because congregations will say, “If you can do this and that, we are not going to give you so much money every Sunday or when you make an appeal”?