Spring Budget 2024

Lord Kempsell Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kempsell (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the powerful speech of the noble Lord, Lord Bird. It is with a strong sense of responsibility that I rise to speak for the first time in this Chamber.

Excellence in debate characterises your Lordships’ House, and we have already heard many outstanding speeches in this debate. For my part, I carefully observed the work of the House before venturing to engage in its deliberations. In that process, I certainly benefited from the advice of noble Lords from all parties and none. I thank all those who have been so generous in welcoming me and granting me the benefit of their wise experience. I particularly thank my introducers, my noble friends Lord Mott and Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton. I extend my thanks to Black Rod, the doorkeepers and all the staff of this House. As we all know, their guidance and support are invaluable.

I turn to the important matter before us. Perhaps the House will allow me to focus on an aspect of this Budget for which I have a personal passion. It is an area in which I have direct experience as an adviser to Ministers, and an area that noble Lords across the House have already touched on today. It is the question of the proper evaluation of government spending.

During my time working in the Downing Street Policy Unit, I led efforts to establish the Evaluation Task Force, a Treasury and Cabinet Office team that works to better understand and embed evidence in government spending decisions. It is right that we devote significant time and effort to debating levels of public spending, but seldom do we discuss the lacuna that lies at the heart of government intervention: we simply do not understand whether many government interventions, often expensive, actually succeed in bringing about the outcomes that they are intended to achieve. I am glad that the Evaluation Task Force is working on that, ensuring that evidence is more available and better understood across government.

I therefore welcome the Treasury document published alongside this Budget, called Seizing the Opportunity: Delivering Efficiency for the Public, which was released with the public sector productivity plan. It notes that, since the foundation of the taskforce, it has worked with more than 300 government programmes, with a total value of around £140 billion, to ensure that there is robust evaluation in place.

I also highlight the Evaluation Registry, which will become a publicly available online database of policy evidence, and the £15 million Evaluation Accelerator Fund, which will tackle the most pressing evidence gaps ahead of the next spending review. I hope these reflections illuminate some of my main policy interests, which are the process of government policy-making and, connectedly, the reform of government.

In concluding, I will touch on my own background, which perhaps is a small example of the good that a reforming Government and landmark Budgets can do. It was a Conservative Government instituting careful tax cuts and sensible deregulation that ultimately enabled my parents to become small business owners in Hertfordshire. So aspirational was my grandfather that he would hold up a copy of the newspaper in front of him at the breakfast table even though he could not properly read. In just two generations, his grandson would go on to graduate from the University of Cambridge and would be published in many such newspapers as a journalist—and, I say with apologies to my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham, sometimes as a source briefing government policy. Either way, it was a trajectory surely unimaginable to my forebears.

So, when I stood up a few moments ago to speak for the first time in your Lordships’ House, I felt propelled by decades of their hard work and aspiration. That is why I believe that the crucial formula that should be at the heart of every Budget is natural human ambition coupled with the innovation of private enterprise, matched by the springboard and the safety net of the public sector, and strengthened by the solidarity of family and community in a free society. That is the formula that will transform opportunity into success.

I therefore welcome the Bill before us today, in which the Government bring forward measures to allow people to keep more of what they earn by their own efforts. It is only by widening economic opportunity that we can defeat a pernicious myth that I am afraid is increasingly told to my generation: the false narrative that the road to success is somehow no longer open in this country to those who aspire to it. I know that was also the vision of the former Prime Minister who put me forward me to serve in this place. I pay tribute to him today, just as I pay tribute to my former team in the Conservative Research Department, which I had the privilege to lead.

Since we are in an election year, I will close by recalling a poster which sums up something of this spirit. It said something like, “What did the Conservative party do for a boy from Brixton? It made him Prime Minister”. So I say today, what did a passion for policy and debate do for a boy from Stevenage? It would lead him to serve in your Lordships’ House, and that is where I intend to contribute diligently, with the benefit of the guidance of noble Lords on the questions before us today and, I hope, many more days to come.

[Noble Lords]

Hear, hear.