Queen’s Speech

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

Wednesday 25th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, I join in the warm welcome to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Newcastle. I suspect that her ears must have been burning, even when she took a break from the Floor. It is rare to see a new Member so warmly welcomed and so appreciated, and she earned it with her outstanding speech, which not only gave us a feel for her but was, I suspect, a small warning to the Government that they had better live up to their commitments to the north-east, because she will be looking over their shoulder from the Benches just behind them.

The Queen’s Speech started with the claim:

“My Government will use the opportunity of a strengthening economy to deliver security for working people”.

But the economy is not strengthening; it is getting weaker. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, and the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, outlined some of the reasons, but I shall add a few more. George Osborne has borrowed £4 billion more this year than was estimated in the March Budget, and we are only in May. Economic growth slowed in the first quarter of a year, growing by only 0.4%. Construction output fell for a second quarter by 0.4%.

Numerous kinds of measures tell the same story, but I want to pick up the example given by the noble Lord, Lord Northbrook, when he talked about signs of a drop in confidence among small and medium-sized enterprises. We know from recent reports that lending to small businesses via overdrafts was down by 13% at the end of March from September 2014. As the noble Lord, Lord McFall, says, that may be something about bad bank behaviour, but it also reflects a drop in confidence by small businesses on an extraordinarily steep scale. That is an issue that the Government must take to heart, and take to heart immediately.

The weakening in the economy is a problem of the Government’s own making. This year they passed a Budget with a £7.5 billion black hole. Their fiscal plans required continued austerity to cut all public borrowing, which because of their definitions means a huge constraint on infrastructure spending for the future. As I have said before, spending on infrastructure is investment and should not be included as day-to-day spending when considering eliminating the deficit, especially at a time when we can borrow at virtually zero interest rates. If the Government doubt the need to accelerate getting infrastructure projects into the ground, I hope that they listened to the noble Earl, Lord Arran, my noble friends Lord Shutt and Lord Shipley, the noble Baroness, Lady Ford, the noble Lords, Lord Berkeley and Lord Patten, and, on broadband issues, the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood—and, indeed, others, who all gave examples of essential projects, all designed and all very close to being ready to go, which cannot be funded under the current regime.

The Government have been tearing themselves apart over the EU referendum and causing instability in the process. In this debate there was a dog that did not bark. I have so often been in debates on Brexit and found that those advocating exit have absolutely no plan for what the economy would look like, and frankly I have been shocked. I would have thought that by this stage we would have had some detailed scenarios and economic forecasts with analysis behind them, as well as pinpointing of industries that would be impacted and regions where jobs would be affected, but nothing, and again, today, nothing. That seems to me to make the argument all of itself.

Quite a number of Bills in the Queen’s Speech are covered by the theme of today’s debate. We want to see the detail and scrutinise and improve them, but I hope that we can support many of them. I shall reference just one or two.

My noble friend Lady Bowles referred to the criminal finance Bill. Many of us were very concerned because most of the content was announced in 2015 by Danny Alexander. We have been looking for this Bill for months, and if it took the Panama papers to draw it on, so be it. As my noble friend said, it will be crucial to make sure that it contains adequate transparency. Noble Lords will not be surprised that I am enthusiastic about the HS2 Bill now coming to the Lords. I am grateful that I do not have to be on the hybrid Bill committee and, boy, do I admire those who are putting their names forward to take on that very big task.

On the modern transport Bill, the work on driverless cars should be meshed with the work on electric vehicles. They go together. One of the risks is that we have siloed that because there is potential for the UK to be a real leader in this area. The noble Earl, Lord Attlee, and my noble friend Lady Randerson warned us that the Bus Services Bill has great potential for providing local control for bus networks, but it must be accompanied by the necessary resources to make it work and a check must be kept on unintended consequences on areas outside those that are covered by the new local ability to regulate.

My noble friend Lord Shipley, the noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, and quite a few other noble Lords warned us that the local growth and jobs Bill, which devolves business rates to local authorities, is a fundamentally good idea, but we must be careful with our most deprived communities, many of which will never be able to take advantage of a business base. They must not be left out and lost as a consequence of this change in structure. As several noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie of Luton, and my noble friend Lady Thornhill, have said, the neighbourhood planning and infrastructure Bill does not deal with the broken housing market—it just assumes that the only problem is planning—or with the lack of affordable social rental, which are critical housing problems.

In the last moments of my speech, I want to refer to the discussion initiated by so many on this side of the House, with no co-ordination whatever, questioning many of the fundamentals of the economy. Intergenerational unfairness is a major issue in our country, with more than 50% of young people, or people generally, assuming that young people will never have the lifestyle that their parents have had. They have been hit by the cuts in public spending, the lack of affordable rental cuts right to the heart of their life opportunities and they need to be engaged. Along with these issues, we have growing inequality, which was starkly described in this House.

I am one of those who really welcome the huge disruption that is coming with new technology—much of it was described by the noble Lord, Lord Giddens—but it means enormous job losses. Antony Jenkins, a former CEO of Barclays, has warned of 30% job losses in the banking industry within the next five years, and the British Retail Consortium has talked of more than 900,000 jobs going by 2025 as a result of automation. There is huge potential, but only if we prepare and make sure that new opportunities are provided to our young people.

We need to look at the whole structure of the way in which our economy functions. Public benefit companies in the US are an exciting new approach to understanding that for the future structures that allow growing inequality are not sustainable in the long term. We have to answer the needs of our broad population. We never want to be in the situation of having a Donald Trump sweeping away votes in this country in the way he currently is in the United States. That means keeping cohesion, coherence and a genuinely fair society underpinned by fairness in our economy.