Spring Forecast Statement

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I think the Minister ought to get my noble friend Lord Sikka a job in HMRC. I have some connections there too. However, I start by paying great tribute to my good friend and associate, the noble Lord, Lord St John, with whom I have spent many hours together over the years. I wish his club Chelsea well, and I wish him and his family a long and happy enjoyment of many years ahead. I thank him greatly for the service he has given to the House.

I am pleased that the Spring Statement was low key and that, to a degree, we have achieved some stability, compared with where we were in 2024. We still have a lot left to do, without any doubt. With the Middle East and Trump, as the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, inferred, and with a great many people unemployed—if you count the total who are in part-time employment—we have a whole series of problems facing us. Unemployment could grow to be much bigger than we have seen.

In any event, the noble Lord, Lord St John, referred to AI and the changes that are coming to employment with AI. There are changes in attitude already taking place with younger people, many of whom do not want to be going into work. If you spend time with them, substantial numbers of them have an entirely different view of life from what we had. We are going to have to start looking at the issues from a quite different angle, but for the moment we look at what we have.

Contrary to the great criticisms the Minister has had to bear, I am going to say a few words of gratitude to him. The one thing that the Tories, and the Lib Dems with them, achieved between 2010 and 2024 was that we had growth. We had great growth around the waist and on the weighing scales when we got on them; we saw that particularly among our children. We had the biggest growth taking place that we had seen for a long time.

This young man, the Minister, has done some work with sugar taxes. I congratulate him on the quiet work he has done in the background by making a number of changes, with more to come, to reduce the element of sugar we have, or certainly to raise taxes on that sugar. That will be to the benefit of the youth and their health in the future. I thank him for the work he has done on that. He should keep trying to persuade the manufacturing, food and drink industries, and induce them to change the composition of many products to make them healthier. I suggest to him again that we have a look at an inducement to use stevia instead of sugar, and that the Government might think about offering tax reliefs to encourage people to switch away from sugar to that. It is much healthier and in the long term would be of great benefit to young people, but in particular to the tax we have to raise to run the National Health Service.

I come back to growth and investment. We had a debate last week with the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, complaining that we do not have enough investment in the country. The following day, we had a big debate saying, “Please do not take money from our pensions and put it into home investment”. We would like to see the voluntary Mansion House agreement working, but if it does not we should try to persuade people more strongly to put money into the UK. From the Government’s point of view, we should explore how we can offer tax incentives if people are not voluntarily willing to do it, so that we will see more capital go into investment.

I come to my repeated subject about opportunities for investment. The noble Baroness opposite shares my view on this. We have simply not done the work that we should do on public/private partnerships. The noble Lord, Lord Macpherson, the ex-head of the Treasury, is not present but has said that we need to review the old arrangements—this is not PFI, but PPPs. We should change them and extend how we define the public and the private. A real winner for us in election terms would be to extend the private to include the public, with Joe Bloggs investing on a scale that we saw in some of the periods under Margaret Thatcher. That will be a very useful means of attracting political support, and particularly for raising cash that is needed for infrastructure in the UK. There is money to be found for investment if we simply use our heads and start offering investments rather than perhaps being seen to be hitting people. I hope that my noble friend will look at that.

I have no financial interest in it, but I am linked to some dentists and some American capitalists who are waiting to put money into the UK. They want to open 40 A&E centres for people with dentistry problems, yet we can get no movement. I do not see any reason why we should not be innovative or look to involve the public in investing in such ventures attached to the NHS to remedy some of the great problems that we have with dentistry, particularly among youngsters.

There is much to be done. I hope that we might have more consensus across the House, as I did with the noble Baroness earlier, in finding solutions to these problems. We are going to be hit with changes taking place in the world and with climate change. We need to come closer together and work on solutions commonly, rather than spend so much time banging each other over the heads. There is so much to be gained from working together rather than disagreeing.