Queen’s Speech

Lord Horam Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Horam (Con)]

My Lords, I am slightly surprised but delighted to be the third northerner in a row to speak from these Benches, following on from the very affectionate remarks made by my noble friend Lady Wyld and the remarkable experiences in farming and so forth of my noble friend Lord Inglewood. I was born in Preston in Lancashire and I therefore complete the trio. The fact that all three of us are Conservatives shows that the House of Lords is not as behind the times as we sometimes think. We are right there, bang on trend, because of course the main feature of the general election was the extraordinary success of the Conservative Party in winning seats in the north and the Midlands. This does mean that the Prime Minister—I will point this out very firmly to him whenever I see him, although that is not very often—has to deliver to the towns and cities of the north of England and the Midlands. It can be done.

Many of our northern towns, as northerners will attest, have wonderful civic buildings from the time in the 19th and 20th centuries when they produced most of the wealth which we lived on at that time. It now comes from London, but back then it came from the north of England. Anyone who has not seen the Harris Library in Preston or Bolton Town Hall has not really lived—I thank my noble friend from Bolton for nodding. These are wonderful buildings, but the problem is that much of that area has become run-down as a result of the manufacturing rundown and so forth, and now needs help. However, I hope it is not just the civic areas that will be helped by the northern powerhouse but the smaller towns. I therefore particularly welcome the £3.6 billion put behind the towns fund, which will help the smaller communities and towns that need that sort of help.

As we have said throughout this debate, this is also about skills. The fact is that the apprenticeship levy is not working as well as it should. We need more technical education. All these areas are highly relevant to the north and the Midlands. We also need to reconnect. The fact is that we have not connected the regions with London as well as we could have in the past.

I also think that poverty in this country is a particularly urgent question. What has happened to universal credit is not good. It needs urgent attention. As my noble friend Lord Forsyth and the noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, said, there is considerable agreement on social care but what is needed, above all, is a big cheque. Therefore, we need to ensure we can afford all this activity. I think we can because, first of all, we can take a more relaxed approach to debt now that the 2008 financial crisis is well behind us. Ten-year yields on UK Treasury bills are down from 3.5% in 2010 to 1.25% today. Therefore, enhanced borrowing, properly presented, is also a possibility.

Like my good noble friend Lord Tugendhat, I think that if we cannot deal with this through a more relaxed approach to debt, we have to consider increasing taxation. I point out to the House that we are a lightly taxed country, relatively speaking, by comparison with our European neighbours. In the UK, tax as a percentage of GDP is 37%; in the Netherlands, it is 40%, in Germany, 41%, in Denmark, 46%, and in France, no less than 48%. I am not suggesting we go the full French—far from it. None the less, a tweak or two on that percentage would not go amiss and can indeed be done. For example, why is the income tax on earned income higher than the tax on capital gains or dividends? It did not happen that way under Mrs Thatcher and, according to Jeremy Corbyn’s analysis, this would raise no less than £14 billion. His analysis may not be arithmetically correct, but there is a lot of dibs there for someone seriously looking to be fairer on taxation.

The Prime Minister said that he was fed up with his slogan of “Get Brexit done”, which dominated the campaign, and has banned it from now on. I suggest two further slogans to him, equally simple and equally powerful: “splash the cash” and “level up”.