Queen’s Speech

Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach Excerpts

Wednesday 12th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to take part in this debate. The gracious Speech outlined a number of policies, but what hit me particularly was that it underlined a great vision—for jobs, full employment, lifelong training, the younger generation moving from Generation Rent to Generation Buy, and prosperity.

On the economy, let us not forget that we are in a very fortunate position. Last year our economy was devastated by Covid. We faced the most serious loss of output for 300 years, and the real prospect of mass unemployment. The Government acted promptly and quickly; we can now expect growth this year of over 7%—just in the Budget, it was forecast at only 4%. This is an extraordinary achievement. I believe the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Governor of the Bank of England deserve great credit and our thanks for their courage and judgment.

I am the 85th speaker in this debate and I wish to be brief. I strongly agree with the levelling-up agenda in the Speech. It provides a lifetime skills guarantee and massive investment in further education and improving communities, not just providing ladders to escape but reviving those communities. There are certain things which only the Government can deal with and which the private sector cannot: one is climate change; another is the pandemic. Much as with national insurance, which we introduced at the beginning of the 20th century to cover unemployment benefit and then the creation of the NHS, people welcome greater public resources being moved into training and rebuilding communities, almost as a form of social insurance. We may well be at a turning point in our society, much as we experienced under Prime Ministers Attlee and Thatcher.

However. getting the public sector right is only half the story. The other half is getting the private sector right. As the infrastructure is rolled out, we must ensure that we have a private sector of investment and businesses ready to take risks. For that, we must ensure that we have a market economy that is in good health, in which markets are transparent but not overregulated and certainly not subject to high taxes. Low taxes, as has been mentioned by a number of speakers, are key to an enterprise economy. The great challenge facing the Chancellor is how to restrict the growth of public spending without increasing taxes at the same time, which will undermine it.

My second point concerns the importance of the detail of policy implementation and not simply policy in terms of ideas, framework, and design. This was mentioned in the context of further education by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and by my noble friend Lord Cormack, who is not in his place at present—

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

Here he is.

[Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach (Con)]

He is behind me. Thank you—the invisible man.

If I learned one lesson being in No. 10 for five and a half years as head of the policy unit, it was the difference between the design of a policy, the ideas in a policy and the implementation of a policy. I saw it in the privatisation of gas, electricity and so on, and in education reform. In the gracious Speech we have a terrific statement of intent. To make it happen, we need implementation.

Are there any risks which could undermine everything in the gracious Speech? There is one: inflation. The Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility are quite relaxed about it, but I am not so sanguine. Globally, we are seeing a tremendous boost to the economy. We are seeing bottlenecks and shortages, as was mentioned. The monetary aggregates are increasing too much, and the fiscal and monetary boost is enormous. Inflation is not mentioned at all in the Queen’s Speech, but a pick-up in inflation such as that which we saw in the 1970s is the one thing that could undermine the great economic proposals in it. It is therefore time to tackle that subject, and not to delay.