Bank of England (Economic Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 2nd May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, I think we just heard a flavour of why at least one former Prime Minister was in the habit of publicly saying that my noble friend Lord Moynihan was a far more reliable forecaster than the Treasury. It is a great privilege and pleasure to follow his maiden speech.

I hope I can say this as an ex-politician among other ex-politicians: if you have been close to government, you can see how far a politician can go by just saying the right things and voting the right way but making barely a dent on the real world. That option is not open to the entrepreneur. My noble friend has gone through life making a tangible and benign difference in field after field. Most obviously, in business he has turned around hundreds of companies, perhaps most spectacularly the firm PA. I speak not of the wire service, I should say in this place, but of the technological and scientific consultancy, which was effectively bankrupt when he took it over and which he left with a valuation of $2.5 billion.

He has done the same thing as president of the Albert Hall. Look at the outside next time you are there and see the transformation made possible by the £11 million surplus that my noble friend created as president. He did the same—I am conscious that I may be queering his pitch with a great many of those in the Chamber now—as the chairman of the committee of Vote Leave, taking over with a deficit and leaving with a victorious outcome.

He is very hands-on. He has most recently been not just purchasing and supplying ambulances for Ukraine but driving them across the border himself in quite difficult conditions. As much for his cheerful and infectious optimism as for his keen intellect and focused pragmatism, we are very fortunate to have him alongside us in this place.

We are living through an unprecedented and uncontrolled monetary experiment. Starting in March 2009, the Bank of England began a programme of money printing that would have put to shame a 1970s Latin American junta. Since then we have increased the amount of money in circulation by an almost unbelievable 50%. Nearly half of that increase has been since 2020 as a consequence of the pandemic.

You cannot magic up that amount of currency without deleterious impacts on people’s lives, although people do not always join the dots. A number of the things that people complain about in this country have their root cause in excessively loose monetary policy—most obviously the squeeze on living standards, but also the rise in house prices, the divergence between haves and have-nots in terms of assets, and the public sector strikes that continue to plague us, as noble Lords will know if they travel here by train. They all have their roots in excessive inflation.

We heard about the malign consequences of inflation from the noble Lord, Lord Macpherson of Earl’s Court. I think I would go further than he did. He said that QE exacerbated but did not cause inflation. What else will cause inflation if not such a massive expansion of the money supply? Milton Friedman said that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon; it is caused by too much money chasing too few goods—“Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour: the Bank of England hath need of thee”.

It was quite extraordinary to hear Gertjan Vlieghe, then a member of the Monetary Policy Committee, say in April 2020 that the balance sheet of the Bank would be comparable to those of the central banks of the Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe—his words, not mine. How can we look at that and not consider the consequential impact on people’s lives in the real world?

I have little to add to the brilliant analyses of my noble friends Lord Bridges and Lord Lamont, but let me make a point about accountability. When people complain about rising prices, rising asset values and the difficulties of having to run to stand still, to whom should they direct their complaints if the root causes are independent authorities, which have been put deliberately beyond the reach of elected Ministers? If the vast majority of the decisions that impact on our lives are taken not just by the Bank of England but by a series of other quangos and agencies, from the Climate Change Committee to the European Court of Human Rights and the Office for Budget Responsibility, the act of casting a ballot is devalued.

That is something that this report takes some steps towards addressing. My noble friend Lord Bridges hinted at this, but he could have gone a little further. He talked about the mandates and appointment processes for governors and other senior staff at the Bank of England. If you are in for a couple of terms and then no one will bother you again, that strikes me as a fairly weak form of accountability.

I would also like to see Parliament taking some responsibility for the mandate of the Bank. Specifically, I would like to see its terms of reference tweaked so that this kind of unprecedented monetary expansion cannot happen without approval. I would like to see the terms of the Bank of England changed so that the maintenance of the value of the currency, sound money, is expressly recognised as one of its goals. Whether or not you agree with me, and whether or not you think that is a proportionate policy, surely we need stronger mechanisms of oversight.

Today is local election day. It is one of the few elections that your Lordships are allowed to participate in. The polls are still open, but I will go out on a limb here and say that the election result will be a massive win for the “Can’t be bothered” party. The number of people who took the trouble to register to vote but did not bother to cast a ballot today will be greater than the votes cast for all the other parties put together. Why is that? Is it sheer cynicism or apathy? Is it not that the decisions that most directly touch on people’s lives have been lifted out of the democratic process and placed in the hands of bodies that are invulnerable to public opinion? Changing the mandate of the Bank of England will not solve that problem on its own, but it is part of a process of restoring the supremacy of the elected representative and thereby restoring honour, meaning and purpose to the act of casting a ballot.