Spending Review 2020
Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts(3 years, 11 months ago)
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Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, as time is short, I will eschew universals and limit myself to two points.
First, on delivering public value, I thank the Chancellor for including as a priority outcome
“a sustainable and resilient local government sector that delivers priority services and empowers communities.”
I have always believed in the value of local government as the exemplar of good and innovative management. I think of Andy Street in Birmingham, Boris bikes and congestion charging. It is nice to see this strength appreciated at last during Covid and to note the £3 billion in additional support set out on page 75.
However, I have a concern about parish and town councils, which of course vary in size, from towns such as Salisbury and Tavistock to tiny villages. These are the very backbone of local democracy, yet I hear from the National Association of Local Councils that the Covid money is just not trickling down to them from the higher-tier authorities. This is despite the fact that many parish councils carry out functions such as parking, leisure and voluntary activities, and that their income is right down. Will my noble friend the Minister undertake to look into the facts and sort this out? For example, could they be eligible for the new leisure fund?
Secondly, my noble friend knows my passion for supporting small business. Recently, I expressed my concern to him on financial services. I am still researching the letter that I promised him and would welcome examples from other noble Lords. It is clearly a serious cultural problem. The spending review mentions small business or SMEs seven times, compared with 35 references to “green” or “greener”—not including the references to the Green Book. How are we going to revive our economy without a better attitude to enterprise, green or not? What are the prospects for the 5.5 million small businesses in this country? As my noble friend Lady Noakes said, we need them now more than ever.
Future of Financial Services
Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts(4 years ago)
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Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)
My Lords, we absolutely acknowledge the role of fintech in the economy. It generated some £11 billion in 2019 and employed more than 76,000 people. The 2020 report has highlighted the UK as a global leader. Likewise, in the payments landscape, we are also highly innovative because we again are a large economy. In 2018, more than 230,000 faster payments were sent every hour, compared to fewer than 3,000 10 years earlier. The noble Viscount is concerned about regulation. The financial regulators continue to provide a platform that facilitates innovation in this space. For example, the Financial Conduct Authority has accepted a significant number of DLT-based projects into its regulatory sandbox to enable the adoption of this technology to deliver better financial services with appropriate consumer safeguards.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
I refer to my interests in the register. Unlike some others, I congratulate the Chancellor and my noble friend on getting ahead and providing as much certainty as possible in financial services, despite the ongoing difficulties with the EU. We need this innovative £130 billion industry, especially as we start to pay for Covid. How does my noble friend think that this package will help the large number of smaller financial services providers—and indeed the businesses they serve—outside London and outside the leading-edge areas of fintech and green finance, which will of course take time to grow?
Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)
My Lords, we absolutely accept that small businesses are the backbone of the wealth-creating part of our economy. One of the answers I gave earlier was looking at the listing rules in this country to see whether we can make it more accessible for smaller firms. I mentioned that I think that you have to issue a full prospectus for anything in excess of €8 million, whereas in the US it is $50 million, so we certainly will be looking at that.
On a slightly unrelated element, but connected to SMEs, the rules reform that we are working on now, post transition, on procurement opens up an enormous opportunity for SMEs, because it will allow us to set our own rules and not be controlled by the EU regime. That covers some £290 billion-worth of government expenditure each year, and we will be making sure that SMEs get a good slice of that.
EU: Non-financial Services
Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts(4 years, 2 months ago)
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Lord True (Con)
My Lords, in the interests of time, I will write, if I may, to the noble Lord with a detailed response on that point.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My noble friend will be aware that the withdrawal agreement does not protect the rights of representation of UK trademark and design professionals in the European Union Intellectual Property Office, while it does protect the rights of EEA professionals to work in the UK for an extended period, when there will be a great deal of new work at the UK IPO. What plans do HMG have to make these arrangements reciprocal?
Lord True (Con)
My Lords, the Government are committed to protecting IP to a very high level and are proposing a chapter in the free trade agreement based on precedence to reflect this. Both the EU and the United Kingdom are IP-intensive economies and we need to make progress. My noble friend is right in relation to rights of representation that flow from the single market, and I assure her that these issues are currently very much in the mind of the Government.
Northern Ireland Protocol
Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
The Statement covers one of the knottiest aspects of Brexit. As a member of the EU Committee, I think it represents a reasonable balance. However, the devil will be in the detail. The new business engagement forum may help. As someone who used to operate across the island of Ireland, I say this: we need a proper physical trial soon, for traders from some different sectors to transport goods from England to Northern Ireland, to the south and then back to England. Please can the Minister consider this further?
Lord True
My Lords, as my noble friend said, we will engage with businesses and traders about the requirements of the protocol. That will certainly be a priority in the coming weeks. She makes a very interesting and practical suggestion and is right that this will need to take account of how those traders move their goods in practice today, so that we ensure the system is as streamlined and efficient as we are clear that it must be. I certainly take note of her point.
Covid-19: Economic Package
Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Lord Agnew of Oulton
To answer the right reverend Prelate’s question, what we have always done through this crisis over the past few months is take a flexible approach and respond as events confront us. If we see that different regions are suffering more than others, we will, of course, look on that as sympathetically as we can.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
Could my noble friend explain in more detail what the Chancellor meant when he said he would ask employers to share with the Government the cost of paying people’s salaries under the furlough scheme from August? In spite of what he said, I hope he can give us an idea of some of the thinking going on. For many reasons, I support the aim of weaning people off government support, but businesses need to quantify this extra cost very soon to determine their route ahead.
Lord Agnew of Oulton
In response to my noble friend, unfortunately I cannot give any more information at the moment, but businesses will be made aware within the next 10 days to two weeks.
Income Equality and Sustainability
Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts(4 years, 6 months ago)
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Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
Most of us are probably in favour of more equality in general. Some will remember that the Duke of Omnium, Trollope’s Liberal Prime Minister, was especially in favour of perfect equality—yet he was vastly rich and owned thousands of acres.
The best way of helping everyone materially in the long term is to increase the size of the overall cake. The capitalist system is by far the most successful ever devised for making a country richer—compare Cuba and Venezuela with the United States and Canada, or, better, South Korea with North Korea. But—and I accept that it is a substantial “but”—the distribution that results from naked capitalism is not regarded as fair, which is why we have progressive taxation, welfare, the NHS and the living wage, which the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of York has of course pioneered. All these allow us to balance fairness with the needs of economics. Moreover, the best measure of equality in a society is generally agreed to be the Gini coefficient, and the fact is that, at least since the financial crisis of 2008, movements in the index have shown that UK society has become somewhat more equal.
As we all know, we have to find enough to pay for the NHS, schools and social care—£230 billion last year, comparable to the total raised from income tax and corporation tax—and, lest we forget, the main provider of taxes is business and the people that it pays and employs. This is why the lockdown must end soon, or we will not be able to afford so much that we value.
Finally, the crisis has shown us that people’s need is not for money alone. We need a society where people show care and respect for our fellow humans. Look how moved we have been by our army of volunteers. Kindness matters, and so do religious networks; one of the horrors of the current rules is that churches and mosques are shut.
I warmly welcome the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby; I have much enjoyed evensong in her beautiful and historic cathedral.
Economy: Update
Baroness Neville-Rolfe Excerpts(4 years, 7 months ago)
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Lord Agnew of Oulton
I share the noble Lord’s concerns about businesses that could be operating. I think we are seeing a gradual return to work. Businesses have now worked out how to manage the requirements of social distancing. Putting the health of the nation first is the Prime Minister’s priority, but if we look at the existing rules, a business can ask its employees to come in if they are not able to work at home effectively, if the employee is fit and well and is not living with someone who is self-isolating for fear of infection or who is on the official medically vulnerable list and if they are able to avoid crowded public transport, which may mean more flexible working hours. The key point the noble Lord makes is that businesses can adapt to provide reasonable social distancing measures in the workplace. That is already in the rules; I expect to see further clarification.
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
My Lords, these are troubling times, and I am glad the Government have taken bold steps, including the new bounce-back scheme, to deal with the problems that confront us. One of my major concerns is that companies will have reassessed their strategies over the past few weeks so that when the furloughing scheme comes to an end we could be faced with redundancies and unemployment on a scale probably not seen since the 1930s. Are the Government planning ahead for such devastating prospects?
Lord Agnew of Oulton
The noble Baroness is right; we face a very uncertain few months and we do not honestly know how businesses will react as we come out of furlough and lockdown. We are looking at the long-term implications. The early indications are that there is optimism. While I think that an inverted-V bounce is probably too optimistic, I think a lot restricted spending will be unleashed into the economy. It is worth remembering that under the furlough arrangement employees are receiving 80% of their normal earnings without the cost of commuting or eating out in cafes or whatever when they are working. I stress that we are looking at all future scenarios.