Budget Statement

Lord Kestenbaum Excerpts

Thursday 27th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kestenbaum (Lab)]

My Lords, as with the eager anticipation of the first cuckoo of spring, we have been greeted in recent days by the suggestion of some stirrings—this time amidst our economy—and it would be entirely churlish of noble Lords in all parts of this House, including on these Benches, to seem reluctant to acknowledge such stirrings.

So what have we been told? Well, supposedly, growth is now well and truly back. Sales are up; house prices are flying again; and unemployment is falling. One can almost feel Sir Humphrey striding in with a beaming face and announcing, “I have good news, Minister”.

Might this just be an appropriate moment then for the Prime Minister’s own, dignified yardstick for recovery to be the appropriate measure for improvement rather than excitable pundits and pre-election spin? This is what the Prime Minister said when he came into office four years ago:

“We want to create a … more balanced economy, where we are not so dependent on a narrow range of economic sectors …We will support sustainable growth and enterprise, balanced across all regions and all industries”.

He went on to say that the Government’s most urgent task was to tackle our public debt.

With the Prime Minister’s own scorecard before us, what do we see? I regret to say that we see telltale signs of headline growth which do not give the full picture. Yes, of course, we can tackle a range of economic indices over the short term and, these days, you do that with that deadly cocktail of cheap credit and government debt, laced with, as the noble Lord, Lord Myners, artfully pointed out, a dash of presentational panache. That cocktail is exactly what lies beneath last week’s excitement. As a recent column put it, we have become,

“drugged up on cheap money, subsidised credit and rock-bottom interest rates”.

What about those two measures that the Prime Minister rightly put to us: reduction of public debt and rebalancing? While there has been much talk of paying down debt, according to both ONS statements and the most recent OBR forecast, net sector public debt is expected to rise from £1.2 trillion in 2014 to £1.5 trillion in 2018. This year alone, the Government are likely to spend £100 billion more than they take.

Equally worrying is how short we have fallen measured against the Prime Minister’s second yardstick: rebalancing in general and, as we have heard in this House today from my noble friend Lord Hollick, productivity in particular. We have heard so much about rebalancing our economy in the past few years. Now that the growth siren is being sounded, it is hardly the balanced version. I said earlier that the Government would hold themselves to account against economic rebalancing between sectors and regions. That is not happening. We can all admire the crispest of last week’s soundbites—“We must make more, build more, produce more”—but the hard fact is that there are few signs of this kind of serious investment in machines, infrastructure and skills which produces the kinds of shift that the Minister spoke of. We are still waiting for business seriously to rebound. In the mean time, infrastructure investment, as the noble Lord, Lord Myners, pointed out, proceeds slowly, most of it being in the south-east. Let us consider this analysis in the recent IPPR research on transport, which states that,

“where transport infrastructure projects involve public sector spending … the spend per head of population is £2,595.68 in London but just £5.01 per head in the North East”.

This is not rebalancing, neither by region nor by sector. There is, truly, no march of the makers. Growth, such as it is, is being led by the south-east and by business services. That makes it vulnerable, and much of the country is not feeling the benefit.

Why are those headline numbers ultimately so worrying for us? Because, at their heart, they do not sufficiently fire the single most important engine of sustainable growth, that which has been referred to so freely in the House today—productivity. Indeed, the Minister acknowledged the importance of that. The productivity gap is back with a vengeance. Our workforce is once again 25% less productive than France and Germany and even further—29%—behind the United States. Hence, the recovery, regrettably, is not what it seems. As my noble friend Lord Hollick said, many of the jobs being created, which produce falling unemployment statistics, while low wage, often part time, make little of our country’s talents and, let us be frank, are undignified, let alone not doing anything for the sustainable growth that the Prime Minister spoke of. Low-paying, low-productivity jobs are the sign of a troubled economy, not a healthy one, however helpful they are to pre-election unemployment statistics.

The trap set for the economy—inadvertently, perhaps—is the inevitable crushing headache that results from too much of the cocktail referred to earlier. It is the headache of short-term flickers. We know that for the economy to be resilient and the recovery to follow it, it must travel to sustainable economic growth via innovation—a reference that the Minister made earlier. We know the facts. Innovating businesses create more jobs and grow faster. Two-thirds of the productivity in this country, according to NESTA’s index, is the result of innovation.

Innovation as a national strategy, as we have seen around the world, is surely the most important driver of long-term prosperity. We know exactly why: because those two elusive measures to which the Prime Minister referred of rebalancing and productivity are at the heart of an innovation economy. Look at the three areas of our emerging competitive advantage today. First, there are the big differentiators: advanced manufacturing, aerospace and pharma. Secondly, there are the smaller fields of video games, visual effects, design and the creative industries. Thirdly, there are the potential golden eggs of the economic future: graphene and biotech. Once you look deeper at those real engines of growth, not just the sectors but the firms, a picture emerges and all the evidence shows that innovative, high-growth firms create the high-productivity jobs of the future. Some 7% of businesses in the UK classified as high growth in the past decade are responsible for half the new jobs.

What do those firms all seem to have in common? Again, the evidence is clear. They are not concentrated in particular sectors. Pleasingly, they are not found predominantly in one part of the country. That is good news when it comes to rebalancing. Rather, one factor links them all: they are disproportionately likely to innovate. Those pockets of the innovation economy, from semiconductor clusters in the south-west of England to the creative industry hopes of the east of Scotland, will be the heartbeat of any sustainable recovery.

We know that the most imaginative global economies—the US, Finland, Korea and Israel—have substantial measures of supportive public policy and effective financing to drive their innovative capacities. They have active, assertive, long-term, growth-oriented government. So, although modest measures in that regard were welcomed last week, I fear that they do little to attack the real causes of low productivity in the UK.

Then there comes the rhythm of announcements. Consider the new graphene centre, but this time against the science capital budget dramatically, drastically cut in 2010, followed by a series of small new initiatives in subsequent years that account for a tiny fraction of the amount previously cut. These are pinpricks in comparison to the opportunity and the need. For example, what progress has been made in using government procurement budgets to drive innovation in our businesses? Such a move—as the Minister acknowledges, at no extra cost—will have a transformational impact. For example, 2% of government procurement towards innovative businesses would be an extraordinarily potent measure.

I fear that such ambition comes second, certainly over the next 12 months, to the lure of the announcement. Too many timid programmes, often disconnected, are launched with fanfare and quietly closed 18 months later. We would instead hope for an assertive, ambitious national programme running right through government which drives the innovation revolution and would produce the type of real, sustainable growth that all parts of the House want.