Queen’s Speech

Baroness Kramer Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, this has been an absolutely fascinating debate. I can say with confidence to the Government that they can expect the Bills that they bring to this House to be extensively amended and, of course, improved.

I begin with the two maiden speakers that we had today and our sadly retiring speaker, because each raised a point that I would particularly like to pursue. The noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds, talked about productivity outside London. She absolutely hit on this issue—productivity, which we find so difficult to shift and change, has to respond to local needs and local opportunities. I hope very much that, as we look at the various skills and other agendas that the Government pursue, they absolutely recognise and home in on that, because I have great fear of a much more centralised approach that will do nothing, just as it has done nothing over the past decade.

I have to say that the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, and I probably look at life rather differently, but he talked about hungry children. I hope that I am not putting words into his mouth, but I think that he seemed distressed that it required a generous charity to make sure that some children actually get a decent meal on any day. If he was implying that it is right that, in a country like ours, every family should be able to feed their children properly, I hope that he will take that message back to the Government, as it has such implications for universal credit, job structures, educational opportunities and public service funding. I hope that he takes that message strongly back to the Prime Minister.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth, whom we will miss so much, said something that I think no one else has picked up in the House today and which was central to our discussions. If we are to achieve levelling up, we have to come to terms with and deal with the abuses and uncertainties in the gig economy. For that reason, I am particularly sad that the employment Bill, which we expected to find in this Queen’s Speech, did not make it, because that would have been the opportunity.

Indeed, it would have been an opportunity to deal with the even broader issue of self-employment. This House will know that I have been so frustrated that 3 million self-employed contractors have not been supported in any way throughout the Covid process. We are going through extraordinary change. Around this House, people have acknowledged the digital change that will come with the fourth industrial revolution and the change that will sweep through as we try to cope with getting to net zero and confronting climate change. All of that will drive a significant increase in self-employment. It has been creeping up on us year after year. The pursuit of a proper framework that follows on from the Matthew Taylor report has often been promised in this House and in the other place. The employment Bill would have been such an opportunity to deal with these issues and create that framework for the future.

Let me turn to the two issues that have occupied much of the time in this House. I will deal with them only briefly because they were covered so well by others. On social care and the NHS, the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, put her finger on the key issue; indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Adebowale, echoed and filled out some of what she said. We cannot sort out the NHS until we deal with social care because the problems in and inadequacies of social care spill constantly into the NHS. Therefore, creating the reform of social care as something to follow NHS reform is entirely the wrong way round.

I want to pick up on another point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley—not just by her, in fact, but by a number of other speakers. We are facing a crisis. Right at the beginning of our debate, the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, pointed to the extraordinary clinical backlog that the NHS is trying to deal with. The noble Baroness, Lady Bowles, put a number on it: 395,000 patients. Noble Lord after noble Lord talked about that clinical problem. A state of crisis is not the moment to start carrying out organisational reform. I very much hope that the Government will think through that timing and order again.

Of course, there are a lot of other issues, whether it is the shift of power to the centre or the workforce strategy that we do not have. I am desperate that, after all these years of discussion, we still do not give parity to mental health issues. Then there are all those unpaid carers who have been utterly neglected; in fact, most of them did not even benefit from Covid protections because they were on legacy benefits.

The other big issue is that of lifetime skills. I come from a party that has wanted a lifetime skills strategy for years, and we have only part of one coming through here. I share the concerns that the lifelong learning scheme is based on a loan mechanism. It seems that the group of people at whom it is targeted is the least likely to want to take on additional debt. We need a scheme that entices people to use it and to increase their skills. I agree with others, such as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, that excluding people who already have a level 3 qualification undermines the scale of change that we need in our skills base. I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Knight, who talked about the problems of loans.

In my remaining time, I want to focus on the issues raised by the noble Lord, Lord King of Lothbury, and to expand beyond them, because the underlying problem that we are dealing with is structural and economic. We have the fourth industrial revolution coming down the track, climate change, the issues of the self-employed and the problems of productivity, but we also have the impact of Brexit and are watching a slow bleed in many of those businesses and industrial sectors, particularly financial services but far from that alone, that have been the backbone of our economy for years—and, frankly, I do not think that free ports provide anything like the answer; they are just a way of shifting business from one area to another. We have to be honest and say that most of the new trade agreements that we have seen have been inadequate to make up the export opportunities that we desperately need.

I am concerned about the problem that sometimes dare not speak its name and the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, finally did. We are at risk from inflation driving up interest rates. We have an overwhelming level of public debt. I join others in saying that I hope we can gradually roll that off over time—such luxury—but in my lifetime there have been so many economic shocks. I remember Gordon Brown thinking that he had ended boom and bust and that all kinds of flexibility were therefore available to him. How we think this through is fundamental. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord King, that turning to money supply as the way to manage or stimulate growth is now well demonstrated as completely inadequate; we have to use fiscal forces if we are to be able to achieve it. The noble Lord, Lord Bridges, addressed this issue to some extent, as did the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, and my noble friend Lord Razzall. I probably would not agree with the solutions that they came to. We may have to turn to taxes as one mechanism to help us bring the debt under control. I do not believe that a low-debt environment is a constant stimulus to economic growth. We went through a period of very low corporate taxes and it did us no good at all, frankly; we saw investment fall rather than rise.

In the environment that we are in now, where we have the shocks of Brexit and of Covid, the fundamental challenges of climate change, the fourth industrial revolution and an underlying problem in productivity, we need a long-term economic plan. My fundamental criticism of everything within the gracious Speech is that there is no long-term plan. There are bits; there are pieces; there are ideas. There is not even a replacement for the cancelled industrial strategy, which, ironically, delivered us the vaccination programme and the capacity in life sciences that we have lauded so much. That is my main and deepest concern about the programme which the Government have put forward.