Budget Statement

Lord Davies of Oldham Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd November 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Davies of Oldham (Lab)]

My Lords, I owe the Committee an early apology. I resigned from the Front Bench after more than 10 years in that role, from the time that we formed the Opposition, way back in 2010. I had therefore expected to play the normal, critical Back-Bench role in this Committee meeting today and found myself suddenly precipitated into a Front-Bench role. I am not sure that I will be entirely secure in this position after 10 years of absence, but I know that my noble friends will back me up and fill in any gaps that I inadvertently leave.

The Chancellor was enormously upbeat when he presented his Budget a short while ago. The problem is that the realities that face many low-income and middle-income families are far from optimistic. As a nation, we are enjoined to be optimistic in circumstances where certain facts have to be grasped because, until they are adequately tackled, we have no basis on which to expect good results.

The Minister made no reference to the Resolution Foundation—Ministers do not and he therefore follows a good tradition—but the Resolution Foundation regards the position of public finances very differently from the Chancellor. We think that placing the highest burden on people who have the lowest income is gratuitously and outstandingly unfair. It is the Conservative Party being loyal to its principles, of course, but that does not make them any more attractive. How on earth people are expected to cope with the cuts to credit that are envisaged in the Budget I do not know. What I know is that, whereas the Chancellor talks of prosperity, certain categories of people are destined to pay a heavy price indeed.

That tends to be the case when we look across areas of government policy. I will take one area in which the Government have waxed lyrical recently—extra funding for schools. They did not preface it with any apology at all for the absolute devastation that has been forced on further education over a decade of Conservative rule; that is to be brushed under the carpet. Our side welcomes the sinner coming to repentance with the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill and development of lifelong learning, which have an important dimension of enhancement for people. But at this stage I warn the Chancellor, in case he has not recognised, as he has not for a number of other issues in his Budget, that this costs a great deal of money. We will be watching the Government and making sure that, during their time in power, they match those requirements.

With this buoyant optimism that exists all around, have the Government recognised their political optimism? “Well, we do not face the electorate for a number of years and there are certain areas where we can see the potential for favourable development.” That says nothing about the burdens on our population at present, in the high costs of food and fuel and the anxieties that people have about whether they will survive this winter, keeping warm, against the outstanding energy costs that they are obliged to meet. There was not much mention of that in the Chancellor’s speech or in the Minister’s speech this afternoon. He covered a fair amount of ground and I congratulate him on that, but he at no stage repaired the obvious damage of omission that could be seen in the Budget Statement and which the country has to live with, for the time being.

The Government pride themselves on certain increases in expenditure—certainly, schools are one. We welcome that. We also note that it only just brings schools’ expenditure per pupil up to the level in 2010, when the Government first came to power. We also recognise that schools are having to recover in a more dramatic way from the pandemic. They are going to find it very difficult, even with the limited increased resources supplied by the Government, to ensure that our students do not face irreparable loss of years of learning, which are difficult to make up.

This is a Budget which enabled the Minister to select and emphasise his favoured bits, but the country has to face the Budget as a whole. What is actually clear is how much this Budget bears heavily down on the less well off in our society, while we are seeing tax breaks for the particularly well off. It is a Conservative Budget all right, and none the better for that.

Standards in Public Life

Lord Davies of Oldham Excerpts

Thursday 9th September 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Davies of Oldham (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a real privilege to participate in this debate. In fact, it has been a real privilege to sit and listen to the contributions, which have in many respects identified issues that should be of great concern to the Government but which we all feel are being somewhat derided at present. I was grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Kerr, for emphasising the difficulties for senior civil servants in relation to Ministers under the present regime.

It seems very important that we get the key points from this debate across to government. We know that the Prime Minister himself probably pays little regard to principles, but there is a capacity for the generation of pressure in specific areas, which is what we should concentrate on, in order not just to improve the situation but to stave off what several speeches reflected, which is the growing sense of unease about critical aspects of our democracy being undermined. I remember when it was suggested during the middle months of the Trump regime that there were one or two defections from democratic participation—challenges that looked to smack of belief in other forms of running society. Then look what happened: it all exploded. Of course, we are not in that situation, but we must guard against such developments.

One of the things I miss most at present is that Covid has taken away school visits for a lot of us. I enjoy talking to young people—by “young” I mean 15 to 16 year-olds and sixth formers, who are certainly young in comparison to the vast majority of us—because two things crop up each time. The first is, “How do you become a politician?” That is interesting, because it seems to give the impression that it is a career in which you have to learn to make the progress of securing first base and then move on from there. I am afraid that I tend to destroy those illusions fairly fast. I have a good record of failure in politics, so they do believe me after a short while.

The second aspect, which is of great importance, is that they do believe that our society can be made better and that there can be improvements—and there are aspects of this debate that must be translated into those anticipations so that it is recognised that the body politic needs improving.

I look forward to the response to this debate of the noble Lord, Lord True. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Blunkett not just on initiating the debate but on the brilliant speech he made. I hope that the Minister will not let the intervening three hours pass in such a way that he will fail to respond to the crucial points put to him by my noble friend. I very much look forward to that speech.

Of course, we have to appreciate the limitations of this House when it comes to action to protect crucial aspects of democracy, because we are unelected and can easily be put down in those terms—but we still need to articulate those defences. The other House needs support on this, because Members there are expressing obvious anxieties, and those anxieties are real when power begins to believe that it can be utterly untrammelled and uncontrolled because of the legitimacy of the last election. Politics in this country have always meant a good deal more than that, and I think today’s debate in this House has helped to establish how important these crucial points are for the continuation and extension of our democratic tradition.

Brexit: Financial Assistance for Businesses

Lord Davies of Oldham Excerpts

Wednesday 26th February 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, the negotiation is a dynamic process; we are at the beginning of what will be a very fractious negotiation over the next nine months. I tell those noble Lords with a gentle stomach that what we are seeing today are the opening remarks of the EU: it is going to get a lot hotter over the next nine months, and we will know more clearly probably by the middle of December.

[Lord Davies of Oldham]

My Lords, I welcome the Minister to his new responsibilities. I remind him that government Finance Ministers do not last much more than a year in the role, so he will not have to put up with too much. I want to make it quite clear that he is reflecting uncertainty and doubt, because that can only be the position that we are all in prior to the negotiations. He must know that the negotiations might even fail to such an extent that no deal at all is struck. Are the Government not in fact just putting hope over practicality when it comes to these issues? Have government answers with regard to Northern Ireland not been quite inadequate on every occasion?

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I thank the noble Lord for his kind and warm words but pessimistic outlook for my tenure in this post; I now have a challenge to be standing here in 13 months’ time. We are in a negotiation. I cannot speak for what will or will not happen over the next few months. We have given certainty to businesses. We have said that we will be trading with the rest of the world in the same way as with the EU from 1 January next year. The level of tariffs and frictionality will be revealed over the course of the negotiations.