Queen's Speech

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Thursday 3rd June 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my colleague from Wales, a fellow Celt. He made his view strongly on coalition politics and his good wishes for the future of this coalition are well made and well received. We are grateful for that. His knowledge of such matters and the time and energy he has devoted to the development of his own community in Wales is well known and we take that endorsement from him extremely well and we thank him for it.

I endorse the tributes paid to the four maiden speakers. I look forward to hearing further from them all. I had a relationship with the noble Lord, Lord Hall, when I was Chief Whip in another place and he was in charge of BBC news. We had many ups and downs together, most of which he won, but in spite of that he will be a welcome addition to this House.

The view from the steerage seats, as the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, described them, is different. I am very impressed by the choreography of the new coalition. In a very short space of time, it has responded to the nation's needs. Noble Lords who have spoken in this excellent debate have indicated that there are problems about trying to determine the detail. There are also problems about constructive tension, but there was no alternative in terms of the nation's needs. To someone like me who is a natural sceptic, the fact that the partnership has got as far as this speaks volumes for the people who have been putting the Government together. I wish them well and I shall do what I can to sustain them.

If the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, thinks that people like my noble friends Lady Sharp and Lady Walmsley and myself will stay quiet, as we are sitting in the steerage seats, he has another think coming. I look forward to yelling from the cheap seats, as appropriate, and I hope to start today.

My speech is in two halves: the first half will say that we, as a country, are broke and the second half will argue for invaluable investment which the Government cannot do without. Most speakers have said that in more guarded terms. The creation of the coalition is exciting and gives a fresh look at some of the nation's problems. There is obviously frustration. I anticipated the frustration of the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland; I could have written his speech for him as I anticipated exactly what he would say because I was there with him in 1997. But we now have a commission which will take a year, and if it does as well as his did, it will be a year well spent. However, we should be further on by now.

On a broader scale, climate change and ageing are two fundamentally important challenges for our nation—never mind who is or has been in government. We have major problems. Ageing affects not just healthcare but everything. We should be planning for the eventuality that we know is coming in the next 10 to 15 years in a much more detailed way. I hope that when the coalition gets its feet under the table, it will have a chance to do that, not just expedite long-term care, on which I agree that it is essential that we act as soon as we can.

I am not an expert on climate change, but I listen to the speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Rees, and others and am frightened by what I hear. I try to look after my own carbon footprint, but as a nation we will have to learn to live differently. It is a function of government to try to provide the leadership that wins that change. If we do not do that, if we do not succeed, we will not only be poorer as a nation economically, because we will miss some of the green economy changes that are within our grasp if we plan properly, but we will find that our lifestyles are being challenged in a way that we cannot control. That may not be an integral part of the Queen’s Speech, but over the course of this Parliament, we cannot ignore it.

On the deficit, we have been told: “There is no money”. I do not think that the public are yet tuned in to what is about to happen. We will get a better idea of that in the Budget, but we will not know until the Comprehensive Spending Review what will be the public service changes—the extent to which things will be different. There are two ways to react to that. You can salami slice everything in front of you or you can look at things differently. The noble Lord, Lord Bichard, who has a lot of knowledge and expertise about these things, made an excellent maiden speech last week. His point was that we must start thinking about doing public services differently—not just more cheaply and with less money, but differently—and use the opportunity of the deficit. We could carry the public along with us, but it is a big job that we have not started yet.

We are not just living in reduced circumstances as a nation—that is a mild way of putting it—there is a huge amount of indebtedness in the households of the United Kingdom. Compared to our sister European nations, we have a colossal amount of unsecured debt. At the moment, 9 per cent of our households are in deep debt. That means that they have more than £10,000 of unsecured debt. More than one quarter of our households is in that category at the moment. The combination of our circumstances is daunting. We must try to use the opportunity in a creative and innovative way to get out of the hole we are in. We will not be able to determine the detail of what is facing us as a country until after the Comprehensive Spending Review in October. We must then be clear about the investments that we need to make to get long-term change. There will need to be some tactical changes to respond to the urgent financial circumstances of the moment, but we must separate what is tactical to deal with that from what is necessary in the very long-term. My noble friend Lady Walmsley and others on the Liberal Democrat Benches have shown passion about the essential element of education to get a better skilled workforce and a higher waged economy—we have a low-skill, low-base economy. That is necessary in the long run. We need to invest to save in the long run at the same time as doing the right thing tactically to deal with the deficit in the short term.

Finally—this is where the spend comes in—I turn to my area of interest, welfare reform. I say to the Front Bench of the new coalition Government that I am willing to look radically and fundamentally at welfare reform. Incentivising those who are on benefits at the moment is an essential part of early reform. I will not support anything that hurts the kind of people about whom the noble Lord, Lord Rix, was talking. The disadvantaged and dispossessed should not be expected to carry the can for those changes. I am interested in proposals that are properly invested in, because if you invest in people's success, they can trade themselves out of poverty. The noble Lord, Lord Freud, was the architect of that policy, but he needs the funds from the Treasury successfully to carry out the policy. If he does that, he will have my support. If he does not, I will be watching him like a hawk. This is an important moment for us as a nation; we cannot really see the extent of the problem until after the Comprehensive Spending Review; but I am happy to contribute to debates on all public services, which are so important, in future.