"My Lords, I welcome this opportunity to review the status of this marathon project. We are here looking at the resilience of this building, but for those of us who have been involved in this for any period of time it is testing the resilience of some of us. The …..." Lord Deighton - View Speech
"My Lords, I must admit that I had feared that this project was being very skilfully directed into the long grass, so I was delighted that the other place selected the most urgent of the options at its disposal—what I would call the “For heaven’s sake, let’s get on with …..." Lord Deighton - View Speech
"My Lords, my first experience of the courage of the noble Baroness, Lady Jowell, was watching her take on the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, to squeeze the Olympic budget out of him, which was as close as you can get to a combat sport. None of us who knows her is …..." Lord Deighton - View Speech
"My Lords, the case that the UK has recovered strongly from its catastrophic financial state in 2010 is hard to dispute—although I am sure some noble Lords will do so. We are now the fastest growing major advanced economy, growing at our fastest since 2007. Employment is at a record …..." Lord Deighton - View Speech
"I entirely agree with the noble Lord. My reference to employment simply acknowledged that having a job enables people to protect their living standards. I acknowledge that productivity has not improved in recent years. That is the focus for the future. I have said that productivity is still too low; …..." Lord Deighton - View Speech
"I thank noble Lords for an excellent and wide-ranging debate. When I first did a Budget debate, the discussion was all about whether growth would ever return. Today, we are discussing whether having the fastest-growing economy in the world, creating 2 million jobs and having zero inflation is a good …..." Lord Deighton - View Speech
"I am very happy to move on. I did not really bring it up. I was just expanding my perspective on a topic that many noble Lords opposite had rehearsed.
With that incentive, I shall move on to living standards. I think everybody accepts that the financial crisis has created …..." Lord Deighton - View Speech
"I will try to deal with facts rather than with emotion. I referred earlier to what I think is one of the better legacies of the Government: the transparency with which we measure things. We do it at every fiscal event. The distribution impact of the fiscal changes under this …..." Lord Deighton - View Speech
"Inequality has not increased at all between the previous Government and this Government. That is not to diminish the problems that people at the bottom end of the scale face. This Government have tried to deal with the root causes of poverty: worklessness, low earnings and poor education. That is …..." Lord Deighton - View Speech