Great British Energy Bill

Lord Mackinlay of Richborough Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 18th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mackinlay of Richborough (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I am particularly grateful to be in this place and very lucky because, just over a year ago, my luck had sincerely run out. I have to give thanks to my dear wife, now Lady Mackinlay, for her forthrightness and robustness—her insistence that a DNR notice and palliative care were not in order for me, and that they should fight for me until the end. But once we got over that small hiatus, I thank the NHS for keeping me alive, getting me on my feet and getting me into the state that I am in today.

I give particular thanks to the right honourable Rishi Sunak, the previous Prime Minister, for including me on the Dissolution Honours List. I hope it was a recognition that I had a little more to give to the political life of this country but which I could no longer do adequately as an MP at the other end—a job that I thoroughly enjoyed. I am sure that noble Lords who have taken that route into this place will know exactly what I am talking about.

I give my great thanks to the staff of this House—I am looking at some who I have had a relationship with for many years. My thanks go to Black Rod, the doorkeepers and the many other staff who have rallied round and offered me help and assistance. I might look like I need help but it is not quite as deep as you might think. Many noble Lords in this House, once they see my office on the first floor—right next to a lift and very close to here—will be green with envy; I have a rather nice room on my own, complete with fridge. They might get an invite and a welcome there in due course.

On 28 September last year, completely out of the blue, and within 12 hours of feeling perfectly well, I was given a 5% chance of living. The sepsis started from nowhere. They said that it was down to pneumonia, but I had had no symptoms and a clear chest. It was completely out of the blue, which highlights the danger of the disease. It is not a disease in itself; it is yourself trying to fight off a disease, and doing it particularly badly and going into overdrive.

There is a lot to be learned about sepsis. It is a killer of 48,000 people a year in the UK. Some will be, dare I say it, very end-of-life, and so little can be done, but there will be many tens of thousands of others whose lives could be saved—or bits and pieces that could be saved—and that is worth doing. I will be devoting a lot of my efforts and the voice that this place gives me to, among other things, highlighting sepsis, working with great charities such as the UK Sepsis Trust, which I have already done a lot of work with. This is not a condition or disease where we are looking for some magic bullet that has yet to be found, as might be true of some forms of cancer. This is easily solvable if you find it and recognise it early—if you can recognise that your loved one is feeling possibly the worst that they have ever felt in their whole life. Thankfully, my wife asked the question: could this be sepsis?

I got through it, after seven months under NHS care. I spent a lot of time just over the bridge in St Thomas’ Hospital. I am very grateful that so many colleagues from the other place, and some from this House, could come and visit me regularly. That is what kept me going. I did not feel that I was really out of the swing of politics for too long, despite laying in a bed for a very long time.

I was unlucky; many people go through sepsis and lose nothing. They might find themselves with brain fog or temporary conditions from which they will recover, but many people do lose bits and pieces. They might lose a few fingers or a bit of a foot. I was very unfortunate; because of the extent of the clotting, I lost all four limbs. They were all amputated on the same day, 1 December last year—a day that, for obvious reasons, I will not forget. After the NHS having spent probably many hundreds of thousands of pounds keeping me alive over a long period, you then come to the question of what we should do to get people like me on their feet.

Do we provide them with appropriate prosthetics? The prosthetics we see here are trial ones—I know we should not use props in this place, but I hope that noble Lords might forgive me today. They are provided by the private sector and on a trial. The NHS, obviously not wishing to spend too much money on items that perhaps will not get used, might give me these prosthetics in year 3. But I want to get on with life in year 1, and I am doing that with this type of prosthetics. To his great credit, the new Secretary of State had a meeting with me and many other multiple amputees last week to discuss this very point. Could the NHS please adjust its way of doing things, so that it is focused on the patient rather than on a menu of what is usually done—a page saying, “We do this in year 1, this in year 2 and this in year 3”?

What was I in my normal old life? I was—and still am—in practice as a chartered accountant and chartered tax adviser, as in my register of interests. There are not many across both Houses, so noble Lords will not be surprised to hear that finance Bills have always been of great interest to me. Sadly, in the last few years of being in the Government at the other end, I did not have too much good to think about many of the finance Bills, so I used my mother’s great saying, “If you have nothing good to say, best say nothing”.

However, that does not apply now, does it? I am over on this side and, if noble Lords want to hear my thoughts on various aspects of the Finance Bill that will be before us—I know we do not have too much influence at this end—I wrote about the IHT APR position on X, or Twitter, over the weekend, and much support that has had. That 20% rate of IHT is not really true if you have to extract money out of a cash-poor business, and then CGT, dividends or income tax has to be paid to get the wedge of cash required to pay the 20% IHT—but that is straying into another field.

Why did I choose “Mackinlay of Richborough”? Looking around, I have noted that many ex-MPs have taken the name of their dear constituencies that they represented for so long. I thought that was right for me, too. I had an unusual constituency: South Thanet. It went from Cliftonville in the north, right the way around through Broadstairs, Ramsgate and Sandwich Bay, into Sandwich and then the hinterlands of Kent, with some beautiful villages. But, right in the middle of the north and south bits, is a place called Richborough. Not many people know that—they do not know the significance of it. It is a hugely significant part of this country. It was where the Romans first came ashore, and there is a substantial Roman fort. I will not go into its history, which is easily available if noble Lords look up Richborough fort on English Heritage—they will find more about it than they probably ever wanted to know. Additionally, in the First World War, there was a major port at Richborough—a proper working port, long since not used because of silting up. It was the site through which much of the apparel for the First World War passed—it was hugely significant in its day.

Nobody lives in Richborough now, to my knowledge, although there might be the odd farm cottage. But one of the reasons why I thought Richborough was such a good name was that it used to have a major power station, fired by good old Kent coal from the Kent coalfields. It was significant in the provision of energy. That has long since been blown up—it went in around 2013. The cooling towers could be seen from north Kent. I was a keen sailor, and you could see it off Whitstable, miles and miles away across the flats of Thanet. But it is long gone and has been replaced with proposals for a huge battery farm, which will be part of the mix of renewables into the future. It is the site where interconnectors from Belgium, Germany and France come in to make up the difference when the renewables we are discussing today fail us—we will probably be using energy on the back of German coal, but never mind that. There is a massive solar panel field nearby and a bigger one has been proposed, and there is even a biogas facility.

So all around that area of Richborough is the past, the present and the potential future of energy provision. That is why I took the name, because this is will be the subject of the future. I fought, through all my years since 1991, to extricate Britain from the European Union. I know this is not a day for contentious speeches, so I will steer clear of contention—a little—but energy will be the discussion point for the next 10, 15 or 20 years. I founded the Net Zero Scrutiny Group of Peers and MPs because of its importance. I am minded of a phrase, although nobody can tell me who came up with it: it is either Benjamin Franklin, General Patton or John F Kennedy—take your pick. It is, “If everybody is thinking the same, nobody is thinking”. My worry is that, on this topic, nobody is really thinking because we have all been working to the same pattern and the same hymn sheet.

This is too expensive, complex and important, and it will change our lives too much—when, frankly, most of the rest of the world is giving up—for us just to let this go through on the nod. That is why I thought today’s debate on GB Energy was a good one to be making my maiden speech in—not least because I can have 15 minutes rather than about five. But this topic will run, and I will take a full part in it.

On that name Richborough, I sincerely thank the outgoing Prime Minister, who represents the seat of Richmond. The name is not only a nod to my former constituents, who were so bold and so brave—I am so thankful that they supported me for those nine and a bit years that I was an MP for them. It is also a little nod to the outgoing Prime Minister, who so graciously gave me this life peerage to continue my work. I thank noble Lords for listening. Today is a day of non-contentious speeches, including from me, but there will be a lot more around the corner.