Finance Bill

Baroness Browning Excerpts

Monday 26th July 2010 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Browning]

My Lords, I begin by thanking your Lordships for the many kindnesses and considerations that have been shown to me since my introduction on 13 July. I also thank the members of staff in your Lordships’ House for their very helpful guidance and the tips they that have given me, such as how to find the right corridor to go along. I have sometimes found myself a little lost but they have always shown great concern and been very kind and helpful. I thank them very much. To many outside this Chamber, it may seem quite a simple journey along the Corridor from another place to your Lordships’ Chamber, but there is much to learn here. It is rather nice that, as somebody who would normally be categorised as a baby boomer, for the past two weeks I have felt myself to be a new girl. That has given me some considerable pleasure.

I have also had experience in recent years of working with Members of your Lordships’ House on issues that are very important to me, issues in which I showed interest in another place and issues on which I hope to continue my work here in this Chamber. I was privileged to be a member of the pre-legislative scrutiny committees on the then Mental Capacity Bill, so ably chaired by the late Lord Carter, and on the Mental Health Bill, so ably chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile of Berriew, who brought a great deal of personal experience to his chairmanship in what was a very complicated and difficult piece of legislation. I enjoyed that work and hope to continue it in your Lordships’ House. I have a particular interest in mental health, learning disability and autism, where I have a very personal family interest. I look forward to continuing some of that work not least because much of the legislation in this area is new to the statute book. The Autism Act 2009, which your Lordships dealt with in the last Parliament, has yet to be fully implemented. Perhaps I may say to my noble friends on the Front Bench that I shall be quite vigilant in pursuing that, to make sure that the Government implement that legislation as it was intended by both Houses of Parliament.

I studied in great detail this very short Finance Bill, and I have to say that I could not find anything in it that was non-controversial. I was given some guidance that said, “If you say something in your maiden speech and somebody is tempted to stand up and intervene on you, then don’t say it”. So I have spent the whole weekend studying this very short Bill—probably more time per line than I have ever given to any other piece of legislation. I have to say to my noble friend Lord Spicer that I rather have chickened out. I hope that your Lordships will be relieved that I just want to make two short points which are associated with the Bill. I see them as a backdrop but I am in no way going to venture into any of the taxation legislation that is before us today.

The first point concerns banks. I think we all agree that there is a need for small and medium-sized businesses not only to start up but to grow, and that a lot is vested in this country in their ability to do so, and to do so successfully. I say to my noble friends on the Front Bench that I believe that the Government need to pursue banks to make sure that there is sufficient lending to the small business sector to enable it to make the most of its and the country’s opportunity, not only by contributing to growth but, very importantly, by creating jobs. I know that the Department for Business has today made statements about what it intends to do with the banks, but all of the policies before your Lordships’ House today will benefit from a viable and successful small business sector that can access funding from the banks. Unlike other parts of business—large corporations, for example, and many of the bigger incorporated businesses which have access to other sources of money and borrowing—small and medium-sized businesses are very dependent on the big clearing banks for funding.

On the subject of banks, there has to be a balance struck between their ability to lend and, in the light of our recent experience of the banking sector, the viability of banking both in this country and beyond it as well. I am very concerned that on Friday, when the Committee of European Banking Supervisors announced its assessments of the stress tests of more than 90 European banks, including UK banks, it came out very late in the day. There may have been a very good reason why it felt that it was better to announce the results after the markets had closed, but it took a lot of analysis by people over the weekend to identify that these assessments were in fact made on the banks’ trade books, not on the whole balance sheets. Further, if you dig really deeply into the CEBS website you will find that the sovereign debt of these banks was not taken into account at all. I am raising the issue in today’s finance debate in order to say to my noble friends that I believe that, while we need to make sure that banks in this country can lend, as I have said, we also need to make sure that any assessment of banks, either individually or collectively, is both comprehensive and transparent or we will not have learnt the lessons of what has happened recently in the banking sector.

Finally, there is the question of the deficit. Noble Lords will be pleased to hear that I am not going to venture into the deficit—but it is huge. It is often quite difficult to explain to people what in tangible terms it means to them and to their everyday lives, and the necessary measures that have to come forward. Debt, and interest on that debt, is accruing at a rapid rate—the figure which I was given this morning was £350,000 a minute. In the six minutes that I have been speaking, more than £2 million of debt has accrued in this country. As this is a maiden speech, I am sure that your Lordships are being very polite—otherwise you surely would have said, “Please sit down before it goes up any more”. I will sit down, but I wanted to flag up the fact that this is something that we have to take seriously. It has to be tackled because the money is going out as fast as it is coming in.