Business and Planning Bill

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Monday 6th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, it was at the beginning of March, in my capacity as chairman of the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership, that I spoke to your Lordships about our actions and responses to the Covid-19 plague as it was then affecting the county. I would like to touch on this again now. On that occasion, I said that the problem was simple: cash was running out and it was more cash that was needed—not next year, not next week, but now. It is as true today as it was three months ago. There is nothing remarkable about this view, but it is true, and it is to the Government’s credit, despite some mixed messaging on the way, that they have grasped that point, and hence we have this Bill. It is equally to all the opposition parties’ credit that they have also done so.

I believe it is a good metaphor for our national predicament to say that we are in a national shipwreck. The boat is badly damaged, but it is still afloat. We now have to get it to port, get it repaired and set sail again. This, of course, requires a different set of measures from those that, at the start of the year, were normal. We now have to crank up the economy and do it quickly, not least—as the Minister said in his opening remarks—in respect of hospitality, business and the visitor economy and associated activities, which are so important in Cumbria. If we can find a way of keeping the weather good, that would equally be a help. However, we are going to have to accept that in the next few months, it is not going to be business as usual, and we have to do our best to help those most affected survive the storm they are experiencing.

I have had an involvement with planning for much of my working life, and I believe we have to have a planning system, not because I believe in a command economy, but because, on a densely populated small island in a very complicated world, the rest of us are entitled to be protected from the excesses of selfishness, greed, thoughtlessness and philistinism. It is not the principle but the way the system has worked that has on occasions been problematic.

One aspect of the economy that this crisis has highlighted is the role of debt. Everything works well when things go well, but when things go wrong and start unravelling, as they sometimes do, it often happens very quickly. Those who lend money like to get it back. We must not, I believe, be too clever by half in our approach to bringing our economy back from this mess. Those businesses that survived the crisis must not be killed by the cure. Business—which, after all, is the source of jobs and prosperity—does all kinds of things, some of them a bit eccentric, many of them in a rather idiosyncratic way. However, commercial resilience and sustainability depend upon adequate levels of working capital and reserves. They need to be cherished.

Having said all that, there can be little doubt that this Bill, with its temporary measures, is something we should generally support at this point in our history. The immediate economic imperative must be to get our economy back working again.