Economy: Growth

Lord Broers Excerpts

Thursday 31st March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Broers]

My Lords, we have had a series of outstanding maiden speeches in this debate, and it is my privilege and pleasure to thank the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, and to congratulate her on a truly excellent maiden speech. She brings to this House a wealth of knowledge on climate change matters, as she has clearly demonstrated. She has worked on these crucial issues with the energy industry, advising Scottish and Southern Energy. She then brought her expertise to government, working on the Climate Change Act, and she helped the Government in their campaign to inform the public about the importance of these issues. Her contributions to public understanding have been noteworthy, and I know that we all look forward to her helping this House deal with, for example, the complexities of carbon trading and the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, not to mention the green investment bank. We welcome her warmly.

I was pleased to find in the Budget some real, if insufficient, attempts to tackle the major issues that confront us—those of low productivity, lack of spending on R&D by industry, out-of-date and inefficient infrastructure, and expensive financing. Many have said that we must restore our industrial base and our infrastructure.

I start with infrastructure. I regard banking as just another element of infrastructure. As with housing, energy and transport, it should be efficient and low cost, and I fail to see how this is consistent with banks seeking profits of the order of 20 per cent or more. Would we be happy if our rail operators made similar profits? Where our banks are operating overseas, it might be justified on the basis that their practices contribute to the current account, but here they should be taking professionally calculated risks on industrial initiatives rather than gambling on obscure hedging instruments. I totally support Mervyn King in his attempts to separate these issues but I do not find much in the Budget to assure me that they will do so.

I join others in pointing out that we need to increase our manufacturing output. Our deficit in manufactured goods remains at about £50 billion. It is encouraging that manufacturing is now growing at 12 per cent, but at this rate it will still take 15 to 20 years to recover what we have lost in the past 12 years. Coutts and Rowthorn have pointed out that an increase of only 10 per cent in manufactured exports, combined with a 10 per cent fall in manufactured imports, would generate a £45 billion improvement in the current account balance, which is equal to the total UK net earnings from financial services and insurance and more than one and a half times that contributed by all other services. To do this, we need more competitive products, and to create these we need a broad spectrum of creative engineering.

The good news is the Government’s acceptance of Hermann Hauser’s technology innovation centres but, if these are to succeed, industry must concentrate its R&D resources in them, as do the Germans. The enhancement of the enterprise investment schemes are also good news. They will stimulate the formation of new companies and appropriately reward our courageous and professional venture capitalists and angels.

The overall problem of course is much larger than can be resolved with the TICs and by new start-ups. Overall spending on R&D must be increased. At 1.8 per cent of GDP, our spend is 40 per cent lower than that of the US, 30 per cent lower than that of Germany and 20 per cent lower than that of France. Our situation is unbalanced. We have a science budget of £4.6 billion, which supports a science base that is second only to that of the US and is our greatest asset, but this is not matched by our spending on development, which should be several times higher. The TSB is doing a brave job with its budget of roughly half a billion but the rest must come from the private sector, which does not seem to be happening.

The reduction in corporation tax will help, as will the progressive increases in R&D tax credit, but why is the change in R&D tax credit restricted to SMEs? Only the large companies can mount the prime manufacturing projects that we desperately need, and it is the large companies that sustain the SMEs. I ask the Minister to explain the Government’s thinking on this.

We have a great opportunity to increase manufacturing output by building our new energy and transport systems. However, sadly, much of this may come from overseas. There is hope that these foreign-owned companies will manufacture those systems in the UK, but surely it would be better if, to take the words of the Chancellor in concluding his Budget speech, more of it carried the labels:

“‘Made in Britain’, ‘Created in Britain’, ‘Designed in Britain’ and ‘Invented in Britain’”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/3/11; col. 966.]

These are courageous words but it will take more than the changes in the Budget if we are to succeed in doing this. I ask the Minister to reassure us that there is more to come.