Covid-19: Businesses and the Private Sector

Lord Dobbs Excerpts

Thursday 21st May 2020 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Dobbs]

That the Virtual Proceedings do consider the contribution made by businesses and the wider private sector in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Motion was considered in a Virtual Proceeding via video call.

[Lord Dobbs (Con)]

My Lords, I am so sorry for the short delay, which has possibly been my fault with the technology. I am truly grateful to my Whips for this opportunity. I also thank the many noble Lords who have indicated that they want to contribute today. Even those who have made it through the virtual culling process have only two minutes, which is pretty thin gruel, and I am sorry, but this is a discussion that we will need to continue.

We are here to discuss the private sector, but I start by thanking all those who have done and are doing so much in the public sector: our extraordinary doctors, nurses, porters, receptionists, ambulance drivers—everyone in the National Health Service. I also thank the local authority workers, the civil servants, the members of the Armed Forces and police forces, not forgetting our charities and the millions of volunteers who do so much to bring our community together. At 8 o’clock tonight I will be applauding them all.

How often have we heard the cry, “I can’t wait to get back to normal”? We have even thought it ourselves, but we will not be going back to whatever normal might have been. We will have to move forward to meet what will be a changed world, with its own very different challenges. It is the private sector—not just big business, but the medium and smaller enterprises, start-ups and self-employed—that holds the answers to meeting those challenges.

What has the private sector done so far? What Britain has needed, it has delivered. A couple of months ago we found ourselves confronted by one of the most acute situations of modern times: literally a matter of life, death and days. The private sector rose to the challenge magnificently. We were desperate for more intensive care beds, so we built Nightingale hospitals. Yes, under the supervision of the Army and the NHS, but who actually built them from nothing in record time? It was contractors such as Mace, BDP, Vinci and McAlpine. Meanwhile, the private health sector provided 8,000 beds and more than 10,000 nurses to help the NHS take the strain. Who can forget the care homes, whose workers have toiled tirelessly through so many difficulties?

We needed face visors, so step forward the Royal Mint, Bollé Safety and Jaguar Land Rover, many of which manufactured visors in days, from a standing start. Protective gowns have come from Mulberry, Burberry, Barbour, Imperial Polythene and literally hundreds of others. The fightback has been tremendous, with well over 1 billion PPE items already delivered to the front line. I thank every worker involved.

But I am not finished. We need millions of test kits; where will we get them? From Roche, AstraZeneca and GSK. It is the same story with ventilators: Babcock, BAE, Honeywell, Rolls-Royce, Mercedes and even McLaren Formula 1. It is a long and extraordinarily diverse list of names, and I make no apologies for continuing with this roll call of honour. Brewers have turned out millions of bottles of sanitisers, and so have cosmetics manufacturers. Chivas and Budweiser have been standing alongside Estée Lauder and L’Oréal, not forgetting Diageo and PZ Cussons. Private enterprise has shown itself to be extraordinarily adaptive. I read on the BBC that one quick-witted manufacturer has turned his 3D-printing operation, which usually makes sex toys, to producing ear protectors for the NHS. This is not quite swords into ploughshares, perhaps, but it seems there is no end to the entrepreneurial imagination.

Beyond this, we have needed to keep food suppliers open, even as we have shopped at a social distance. Who changed overnight to meet the need? Yes, the retailers: the supermarkets, the takeaway outlets, the village shops in the countryside and the corner shops in the towns. We have even managed to meet the deranged demand for loo rolls. My village shop in Wylye has kept itself open and is doing home deliveries of food, prescriptions, news and, perhaps most important of all, comfort to the elderly, looking out for them. They have kept Wylye running, just as the power generators, petrol stations, transport firms, heavy-duty truckers and white-van drivers have kept the entire country running.

Who will provide the vaccine, as and when it is developed? Yes, the private sector, in collaboration of course with our finest universities, like Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial. Ask yourselves: who provides the backing and the financial resources for so many of these university research facilities? There is a simple answer: the private sector. The list of business that have adapted to provide Covid-related services is almost endless. Some have tens of thousands of employees, some less than 10. There is an excellent tally on the Manufacturer website that is so long that it will take an hour to read, and I hope will take noble Lords just as long to applaud.

Before the cynics start claiming that they only do it for the money, let them go and talk to some of those involved. This is what one business leader, whose company has been working on beating Covid, told me: “It was like nothing I have seen before. Our employees worked tirelessly for weeks on end, until late at night, and not seeing their families even over the long Easter weekend. They used their ingenuity and were motivated by the need to save lives.” And that particular firm did not ask to be paid for its efforts.

We have been faced with circumstances that no one alive today has ever seen before. It is a challenge of historic proportions. But no one has run out of fuel, no one has run out of ventilators, no one has run out of food, and neither must we run out of hope, initiative and enterprise.

Yet there is a price to be paid for beating Covid. More than 2 million people are now out of jobs. School and university leavers will find it far more difficult to move on with their lives with a quarter of all graduate jobs gone. A new generation is about to discover the pain of mass unemployment, through no fault of its own. There will be a heart-breaking rise in insolvencies and bankruptcies. Many firms will go bust, which is why the Government are right to bring forward a new insolvency Bill to help companies in trouble. There are hard times ahead for us all.

Yet there are some who seem almost to welcome the downturn, using it for their own narrow ideological purposes. “More control, more regulation; we must put welfare before wealth,” they cry. Rarely has more nonsense been encapsulated in a single phrase. Without wealth, and particularly without new wealth—which we are going to have to create—there will be no welfare. We cannot share what we have not got.

We are going to face entirely understandable demands for increases in spending on health, our growing number of elderly people, cleaner and greener industry, education and training. Yet, far from their hoped-for increases, these sectors and many others face budget cuts that will turn their dreams to nightmares, unless we can get Britain back to work.

Last weekend, the Sunday Times published its new “Rich List”. I know the very thought is enough to send timorous wee beasties into spirals of outrage, but who stood at number one? Sir James Dyson, that extraordinary, inspiring and very British engineer and innovator. His success does not make him perfect; he admits to mistakes. He blew half a billion pounds on developing an electric car: a great idea, but not to be. How did he respond to failure? Overnight, he retooled his facilities and began developing a new kind of ventilator for the NHS. That did not work out either: the NHS has more ventilators than it is able to use. Now, he has switched the workforce and facilities he used to develop the electric car concept into totally new research. “Ours is a life of risk and failure,” he says. “We try things and they fail. Life isn’t easy.” Well, he can say that again. But life is not about getting everything right; it is about getting enough right to make a difference.

Covid-19 must be fought on many fronts and in many ways. It is not just about a disease but about an economic recession that will bring with it mental illness, poverty, pessimism—afflictions that are already causing an increase in the number of non-Covid deaths. In the coming months, we will be hit by a tidal wave of appeals to support this sector or that interest, all of which may be thoroughly worthwhile, even vital. However, we cannot look forward if we are shackled by poverty and failure, and lockdown means poverty. If Britain ends up permanently poorer, the virus will have won. We need to turn the situation into an opportunity to create new wealth.

This will only come through the private sector. It is the private sector where we will find the means to take the revolutionary ideas pouring out of our universities and turn them into world-beating enterprises. It is the private sector where the new vaccines and drugs we need will be developed. It is the private sector where we will find new firms to harness the technologies that will enable us to live greener and cleaner, where the new jobs will be created that will restore hope and where the future prosperity of this country will be built. In the private sector. It is not perfect; I do not pretend that it does not have its faults, but it is the only solution to the challenge that Covid-19 will leave behind.

The Government have done an extraordinary job in providing short-term support, with furloughs, interest-free bounce-back loans and interrupted business-scheme loans, but, as always, our tomorrows will be created by ideas and enterprises that we do not yet know about. So, at every turn, the emphasis must be on supporting new enterprises, as well as bailing out old ones. Workplaces must look up again. Yes, there are risks in doing that, but there are risks on both sides of the equation. There is no place called safety right now.

I am also keen for this House of Lords to get back to our proper way of business. Otherwise, the idea will grow that we are nothing but a gathering of the elderly and infirm. Between us, we have many lifetimes of accumulated experience, so I welcome the commitments we have been given by the usual channels to get us back to full sittings as soon as possible—and perhaps even earlier, please.

One day soon, there will be a day of reckoning and inquiry, of looking back to ask how well we as a country did. Could we have done more to beat the virus? No doubt it will be filled with lurid headlines and partisan opinions that rely entirely on hindsight, but we must not shirk from that. We must go on getting better. We should remember that even Winston Churchill needed a Dunkirk before he reached his D-day. Nothing lasts forever, not even misery and disease. The infection rate is falling, along with the number of deaths, and I remain an optimist. I will stick to a few basic truths: there will be no recovery without risk, no welfare without new wealth, and a vibrant private sector is in the greatest public interest. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Dobbs]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Callanan for his attention to this debate. We have all enjoyed some dodgy IT, the barking dog belonging to the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and some very tempting sunshine outside. Nevertheless, we have got through what I think has been an excellent and wonderfully wide-ranging debate. Astonishingly, I am told that it is the first debate on the private sector in Parliament since the Covid crisis began, so, once again, the House of Lords is doing what it does so well.

Noble Lords will understand that I cannot possibly do justice to all the excellent contributions. However, I would like to express sympathy for those who were unable to participate despite preparing valuable contributions. I hope that we will get many more such opportunities over the coming months and when we get back to full and proper debate.

The noble Lord, Lord Addington, made a very powerful point about the disabled—a point that touched me. It reminded me, and I hope that it reminds us all, that the private sector is not just about the big battalions or the behemoths; it is about ordinary people: workers; the abled; the disabled; working mothers; part-timers; the elderly; and apprentices, as the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner of Margravine, reminded us—those who will never be rich but who want no more than to care for themselves and their families. They are the private sector, too. There are millions of them and that is why we should care.

The debate ahead, which we will continue to have, has been pretty clearly outlined. The noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, criticised the Government. My noble friends Lord Lang and Lord Naseby questioned the abilities of those at the centre—in government and in the Civil Service—to deliver the things that they hoped to deliver. Where will the future balance come from?

Fascinatingly, there has been little criticism of the private sector but much praise—from, for example, my noble friend Lord Hunt of Wirral. The private sector has done very well, although inevitably there have been some exceptions, as the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, reminded us. My noble friend Lord Balfe—I thought, quite correctly—also reminded us that we should examine the moral basis of what we do and how we do it. I hope that we will always do that. I enjoyed the characteristically powerful plea from the noble Lord, Lord Empey, for us to look at the role of the manufacturing industry and at shortening supply lines.

There will be—there must be—an ongoing debate, and even dispute, ahead of us about all the things that we have discussed. None of them is easy, yet many noble Lords—the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett; the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, with his plea to work together; and the noble Lords, Lord Liddle, Lord Campbell, Lord Fox, Lord Stevenson, and many others—talked about the public and private partnership. To give a little context to those perfectly correct pleas, the public sector employs less than 17% of the workforce; the private sector is far larger—five times larger—and that is why it deserves our attention.

I think that we can be proud of this debate. We must all get back to business. In particular, I am told that I need my hairdresser. In the meantime, I reiterate my thanks to all: those in front of the screens, those behind the screens and those who never made it to the screens. I wish them all health and happiness. Once again, I express my thanks.

Motion agreed.