G8: Eurozone and UK Growth

Lord Kinnock Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, I absolutely agree with my noble friend and I do commend the website to Members of your Lordships’ House. However, I also point out that at the G8 summit significant progress was made on tax transparency, whether in promoting the standards of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, promoting a new global standard for automatic information exchange, or making more information available on beneficial ownership. These are big changes on which the UK is taking the lead.

[Lord Kinnock]

My Lords, is the Minister aware that the economies of Germany and other countries are far more regulated than ours and are performing far better than ours in terms of sustained growth and exports? Does he accept that it can hardly be regulation that is the fundamental cause of the problems confronted by our people now? Is it not more to do with a stranglehold on consumption, and can he tell us how the further constriction of consumption can possibly help in generating the additional growth that we need to restore the performance of the United Kingdom?

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, the key thing now is to drive unemployment down by continuing growth. That is the way in which consumption will rise. A key element of that is making sure that interest rates stay at a low level, which is the centrepiece of what the Government have been seeking to achieve. I absolutely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Peston, that one should not count chickens, but I think that he is almost wilfully failing to count those very small chickens that may be poking their beaks out into the sunshine.