Spending Review 2020

Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth Excerpts

Thursday 3rd December 2020 Grand Committee

[Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth (Con) [V]]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, and I thank my noble friend Lord Agnew for introducing this debate. This short-term spending review is against a backdrop of an economy that, as my noble friend said, is in greater decline than it has been for 300 years. That is the backdrop to the challenges we face.

I believe that central to the question of the review is how bad the economic forecasts are looking, and at the heart of this is the uneven effect of the crisis on the regions and communities of the United Kingdom. I join the noble Lord, Lord Liddle, in his concluding remark by saying how central to this are decentralisation are devolution. This has to be addressed, so that we can provide more local innovation and more local solutions, and I welcome the Government’s commitment to this.

Levelling up is indeed central to this agenda, and devolution will help in that regard. Protection of the low paid and key workers is fundamental, as is helping the young, who have had their education disrupted by this pandemic, and apprenticeships of course have been lost.

The spending review confirms funding for the Government’s 10-point plan for green recovery, and I very much welcome that. I believe that more will need to be done against the background of Glasgow, COP 26 and the re-engagement of the United States via the Biden presidency embracing once more the Paris Agreement on climate change. More money and more commitment will be needed, but I very much welcome what we have done so far.

To my mind, the Chancellor and the Treasury have performed generally well in this crisis, although I do fundamentally disagree with the percentage cut in UK overseas aid. It is falling anyway, obviously, because it is a percentage of a declining income, so less is being given. I cannot help feeling that it is against our enlightened self-interest, as well as meaning that we are giving up our very strong moral leadership in the world.