Queen’s Speech

Lord Davies of Oldham Excerpts

Thursday 5th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Oldham (Lab)]

My Lords, this has been an excellent debate, with many very effective contributions. Of course, it was graced by the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Rochester. We hope that his obligations to another assembly do not mean that he will not be able to attend ours with some degree of regularity and make contributions such as he did today.

These debates are extremely difficult to wind up, as the Minister will prove in a few moments, I trust. Partly of course it is because although a number of departments are down to be considered, noble Lords always make comments on departments that are not on the list. The list includes five major departments so the House will have to forgive me—and the Minister, I have no doubt—for prioritising my response to the issues.

We had a penetrating analysis of the economy in this debate. The Minister emphasised progress on infrastructure and plans for the future. I must say that most of the areas he was able to emphasise seemed to be infrastructure projects which went back in time. Crossrail and Thameslink were both started under the previous Government and HS2 was the initiative of my noble friend Lord Adonis, who opened for the Opposition in this debate. I am not surprised that the Government are eager to claim credit for the progress that has been made over the past few years, but on all sides of the House we recognise that major infrastructure projects are bound to proceed across several Governments. I hope the Minister will recognise that in a debate such as this, where he is meant to defend the Government’s policies and plans, reference to those originated in the past may not carry quite as much weight.

The noble Lord, Lord Birt, raised an issue to which the Minister made no reference and I am not sure whether the Minister replying to the debate will make much reference to it either. As the noble Lord asked, how on earth can it make sense that one of the most successful airports in the world, which is operating constantly at peak capacity and serves the nation in such a significant way, has five years of delay because the Government decide that it is too tricky an issue to address until after another general election? That, I should have thought, counterbalanced some of the praiseworthy attempts to show that our infrastructure programmes were on target.

My noble friend Lord Adonis referred to another area about which we have considerable concern. Everyone knows that the A14 road is of great significance to the country. After all, it links the Midlands to the docks at Felixstowe. It is a road that has been under incredible pressure for a considerable period. It also links with the A1, and therefore goods from the north. Where is the A14 at the moment? It is constantly subject to delay about whether its position should be enhanced. The Minister indicated that at last there is a desire to make progress on the A14. Yet again, we have seen several years of delay on a crucial transport infrastructure project.

As for the legislation, that concerned with transport scarcely measures up to the significance of transport as a crucial element in the economy. In the Queen’s Speech, we have a proposal, to which we are not in outright opposition, to change the nature of the Highways Agency. We agree that it is advantageous to try to ensure that the agency has some long-term perspective on its work. We also agree that it is entitled to some degree of operational independence. Not just we in this House but the Select Committee on Transport in the other place have great difficulty understanding the reasons behind the change to lock in the roads budget and incentivising staff by getting rid of the restrictions of Civil Service pay. I wonder whether those two objectives merit legislation related to transport in this debate, because they do not answer the questions that we have. Is the Highways Agency to be a strategic body? If so, where is the place for the Minister in the Department of Transport if a body is responsible for planning the roads for the future? How do we make this body answerable to Parliament? What will be the basis of more day-to-day scrutiny of this body and how will it be held to account? Will we in fact see any relationship between this body and the local and regional government to which it obviously ought to relate? The answer is quite straightforward: there are no answers at this point. We will of course debate the issue but this scarcely looks like a measure which is adequate to the needs of transport at this time.

We have also seen others introduce important dimensions to this debate in terms of transport and the welfare of people that revolve around the issues of local government. We often feel that, with regard to a debate on the Queen’s Speech, local government should be significant enough to be a focal point of the debate with a Minister answering on it. However, we are not blessed with that decision today. The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Leicester first raised that issue of local government and the importance of communities, and my noble friend Lord McKenzie brought his formidable knowledge to the issue to emphasise how much pressure local authorities were under. While we might have thought that that viewpoint was bound to be expressed by the Opposition, the noble Lord, Lord Tope, having first regaled us with the multifarious successes of the Liberal Democrats in the local elections, went on to indicate that the worst is yet to come. He said that local authority budgets would in fact be under greater pressure in this coming year, during the run-up to the 2015 election, than they have been up to now. The House should quail at that prospect because it is of course accurate.

Several noble Lords went on to discuss the issue of housing. It was raised first by my noble friend Lady Andrews in her very thoughtful contribution but my noble friend Lord McKenzie referred to it and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, also emphasised housing in his speech. It was also referred to in the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Rochester. Of course we all welcome Ebbsfleet and the concept of a garden city but Ebbsfleet will produce 15,000 homes, when on all sides it is recognised that the scale of the housing crisis we face is measured in terms of hundreds of thousands of homes. That is why we would have expected something more significant from the Government on housing than we have in that Bill.

The noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, missed no opportunity to emphasise the energy aspects of the debate today. He was following the noble Lord, Lord MacGregor, who had referred to the important report of the House of Lords committee. We agree that it is important that the issue of shale is discussed as fully and as early as possible. There cannot be gains in delay but there are gains in ensuring that we get it right and give reassurances in the legislation to local communities on the potential extraction of shale. However, it would be absurd not to recognise the importance of getting as much information before Parliament as quickly as we can. That is why I support those two noble Lords in their representations on the work of the committee and appreciated the emphasis which they both put on shale.

Much of the debate revolved around the issue of the Treasury and the economy. We all appreciate that the base on which the development of our society turns depends a great deal on our ability to increase the resources available to the nation and to secure the fair distribution of those resources. I thought that we might have a fairly predictable and pedestrian debate on the economy but we were electrified by the contribution of my noble friend Lord Giddens, who asked the Minister summing up the debate to consider the position of two philosophers, Karl Marx and the Governor of the Bank of England. The Minister knows that she can concentrate on the Governor of the Bank of England but my noble friend was concerned to put before this House, and demand that the Government consider, the fundamentals of the nature of our economy and our society. There is plenty of evidence now to identify that distinctly unequal societies perform less well, have lower rates of economic growth and have lower rates of satisfaction in their communities than more equal societies. There is evidence developing now, and of course the Governor of the Bank of England was referring to this, that societies that seek to create more equal and rational rewards are better.

We never hear from the other side of the House—or at least very rarely; certainly not in my presence—concern expressed about the absurd difference that has grown up between the pay of chief executives along with those who are highly paid in industry and commerce and the static position of wages over the past decade. If the Government think that they are sailing into sunny uplands with a gentle drift towards success in the next general election, I point out to them that there was one reference that said that real people are yet to see the benefits under the coalition’s economic priorities. The person who that quote is taken from is Kenneth Clarke, who happens to be a member of the Cabinet in the coalition Government.

There is a great deal to worry about in the extent to which our communities have suffered so grievously over the past four years. I know that the Government purport to say that all the sacrifices were worth while because at last we have growth. We were bound to get growth at some stage, but we have had wasted years in which our people have seen their living standards decline in significant ways. It is therefore important that the Government recognise that the challenge is laid down from this side of the House. The Queen’s Speech scarcely merits much in the way of challenge. Most of us have scarcely seen a Queen’s Speech so devoid of content. If it is not zombies who have produced this gracious Speech, it is certainly those who agree with their colleagues in the Commons that a year before the day when you know an election is going to be called, you are much better off being in your constituencies talking to your constituents than passing legislation that Ministers are trying to foist on you.