King’s Speech

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 14th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank everyone who has participated in this interesting debate, even if we know that the country’s attention is largely directed otherwise today. No, I am not talking about what is happening within the Labour Party but in many areas around the country, the politics that has the most immediate impact on the lives of people and communities is changing.

New councillors and new leaders of councils are settling into their roles: 587 of them are Green councillors, two of them our first Green elected mayors. In Hackney, Waltham Forest, Norwich, Hastings and Lewisham, Greens are settling into control of those councils. In news just in, the Green Party’s Matt Jenkins has just been elected leader of Worcestershire County Council, displacing a chaotic Reform Party leadership. He will no doubt be working closely in Worcester city with the wonderful 26 year-old musician Tor Pingree, who is taking over as mayor. As Greens, we are really showing that politics can be done differently, and Worcester woman, and many others, are taking note. I must also note the imbalance between the votes just cast and the number of Greens in your Lordships’ Chamber. It would be nice if that could change in the near future.

I turn to the specifics of today’s debate. I try to praise where I can, so I am pleased to see the desire to build a closer partnership with the EU. I hope that very soon we will restore, at least to our young people, some of the freedoms and opportunities they have lost since Brexit, as we need to see the country move closer to a customs union and the single market, and eventually return to membership. Unlike the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, I know that the people’s democratic will is not set in stone: it does not last for decades or centuries; it can change. I know that the public understand that if you are in a hole, you should not keep digging.

On our main subject, the economy, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Burns, who offered the Chamber a sombre, realistic view of the UK’s prospects as a middle-ranking power with an ageing population in a world of long-term “global slowdown”, in which

“it looks as though that pattern will continue”.

That showed a realism that we might expect from the Cross Benches but which we urgently need other corners of the House to grasp. The noble Lord also acknowledged—I thank him for recognising that there are alternative economic views to those that have put us in this mess—that not everyone in this Chamber regards growth as the holy grail.

We are not hearing from the Tory Benches or the Labour Front Bench any assessment of whose growth it is. Is it the few getting richer while the rest of us get poorer? Are we building up even further an unstable, insecure financial sector that concentrates wealth in a few hands in a few parts of the country? Are we ensuring that our economy can endure climate, geopolitical and health shocks, and that resilience, rather than spindly, fragile poles, props up the GDP figures? What costs are being borne by exploited human bodies, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle said, or by the already parlous state of nature on these islands and around the world? What costs will future generations bear for any growth that we seek today?

The noble Baroness, Lady Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent, spoke about aiming to strengthen and reform our foundations and bring “prosperity to every corner” of the economy. That deserves to be contrasted with the Prime Minister’s introduction to the Speech, which talks about creating “more highly paid jobs”. If we want prosperity in every corner, surely we need to ensure that every job is at least decently paid—one that gives individuals and households security and stability, and the ability to live well now and plan for the future. With, after housing costs, 20% of the population living in poverty, the words we heard from the Chancellor this morning, summarised by the Guardian as,

“if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”,

will ring very hollow indeed for many people, including those in poverty and those nearing and fearing it, who find themselves running faster and faster just to barely survive economically.

What would the Greens do instead? For starters, urgent action is needed to bring down people’s bills, and we need rent controls, nationalisation of water, freezing of energy prices and the taxing of wealth. People, particularly those living economically on the edge, are being subjected to an increasingly depleted, polluted environment, which, as we are understanding more and more every day, is terrible for their health.

Where is the environment in the Speech? We have plans that are awful and indefensible, both environmentally and economically—just look at the financial carbon bubble we face already—to expand airports, build roads and slash the regulation of nuclear power plants. Whose back gardens are those plants likely to end up in? Not those in Chelsea or the Cotswolds, we can be sure. My noble friend Lady Jones will cover more of this next week. Additionally, in the promised regulating for growth Bill, we have a vow to “strengthen the growth duty” for Natural England, the Environment Agency and the Health and Safety Executive. The Government are lining up with the Tory Benches with an ideological attachment to so-called slashing red tape, an approach that has left us with the unhealthy nation we have now.

Your Lordships’ House has heard me speak often on chemicals regulation, an issue raised this morning by Greenpeace, counting the more than 100 pesticides likely to have been sprayed on your Sunday roast, seven of which are banned in the EU. We might at least see some positive steps there, but I come back to the health of the population—our ageing population. Why is there nothing about this in the Speech and the Government’s presentations of it? Healthy life expectancy in the UK—the average number of years a person can expect to live in good health—fell by two years in the past decade. Healthy life expectancy has now fallen below the state pension age of 66 in more than 90% of areas. In more than one in 10 local areas, healthy life expectancy is below 55 years.

What else is missing? Those who advocate for animal welfare are rightly fuming at one gaping hole. As recently as December 2025, Defra published its Animal Welfare Strategy for England, a document that sets out a series of commitments intended to raise standards, strengthen protections and position the UK as a global leader in animal welfare. In its 2024 election manifesto, Labour promised to

“improve access to nature, promote biodiversity, and protect our landscapes and wildlife”.

Perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Livermore, can tell me more about the Government’s plans to deliver on this, given they are missing from the Speech.

I also have to mention a report out this week about the state of our universities from the Education Select Committee. It warns that the Government have no clear plans for universities facing insolvency or protections for students who could be caught in that trap. The committee says that 24 universities are at risk of insolvency and closure within 12 months. Many of them, of course, are economically crucial to the communities in which they are placed.

Finally, there are a couple of other missing things. I declare my vice-presidency of the National Association of Local Councils. The Government promised to act on remote and hybrid council meetings, but that is lacking, as are measures to strengthen the framework for standards.

I started with local government and I return to it as the levels of government that, with adequate resources and power, could strengthen many of the foundations of our society—the health of our people, the supply of healthy food, the support for vulnerable children and adults—and rebuild our society in a way that Whitehall, at least under successive legacy parties, has demonstrated it is unable to do, and which this Speech, whether the legislative programme is delivered or whether we have a whole new one in a few weeks, is certainly not going to do.