Financial Services: Mansion House Speech

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her question. When I first became a shadow Treasury Minister, the noble Baroness was taking through the Act that introduced the secondary objective, and we were very supportive of it at the time—I remember those debates well.

On her first question, I may have to write to her as I do not have that answer to hand. On the fraud question, the Chancellor, Home Secretary and Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology have written to leading tech and telecom companies, calling on them to go further and faster with clear, demonstrable action to reduce the level of fraudulent activity that exploits their platforms and networks. This comes ahead of the legal content duties under the Online Safety Act coming into force next year. The Act requires user-to-user and search services in scope to take measures to respectively prevent and minimise illegal fraudulent content on their service, or face the prospect of significant fines.

Building on existing measures to tackle scam calls, telecom companies have also recently agreed to a second fraud charter, to help prevent the misuse of telephone networks by criminals. We will monitor this closely in the months ahead, as the Government prepare the expanded fraud strategy.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I wonder whether the Minister recalls the conversations we had, before he was in government, about the possibility of having a fresh look at PPPs—public/private partnerships—to see whether we could update them and perhaps use them in a better way than in the past. One of my concerns is that the private equity funds that we see growing on such a scale are leading to a diminution of the number of individual personal investors in stocks and shares, of the type who were encouraged in the 1980s and 1990s.

I see that we are now going to call for evidence to examine the common bond on credit unions, and I wonder whether that could have been extended to having a review of the structure on public/private partnerships. We ought to be seeing whether we could encourage a change that would allow the public to invest directly in public/private partnerships, and whether the concept should not simply operate on a national level, as originally introduced, but be moved down to local-level activities and used particularly in expanding the growth opportunities in green energy.

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am grateful to my noble friend for the question. I do remember the conversations we had in the past and I am, of course, happy to continue to discuss these issues with my noble friend. He talks about partnership; it is a key part of our investment plans. Partnership between public and private investment is key to our national wealth fund, with our public sector investment leveraging greater amounts of private sector investment into exactly the kind of green technologies that my noble friend references. I understand and sympathise with the spirit behind his question, and I am very happy to continue discussions with him on that point.