Lord Livermore
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Corporate Profits: Inflation
Lord Livermore Excerpts(10 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Baroness Penn (Con)
My Lords, I have to disagree with the noble Lord. The higher rates of inflation that we see are seen in countries across the world. I believe there are nine EU countries with higher headline rates of inflation than the UK, and more than half of EU countries have higher rates of core inflation than the UK. The noble Lord talked about the importance of productivity to our future economic well-being; I could not agree more. We need greater investment to drive greater productivity, and we would not see that with the kind of policies advocated by the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, such as windfall taxes and other measures that would deter investment from our country.
Lord Livermore (Lab)
My Lords, to follow up on the Minister’s answer to my noble friend, as she said the IMF has described so-called greedflation as a Europe-wide phenomenon, yet despite the Prime Minister promising to halve inflation, Britain continues to be an outlier. The UK has the highest inflation in the G7. Last month, core inflation increased to 7.1% in the UK—a 31-year high—while in other advanced economies, including in the eurozone and the US, it has started to fall. The Government often argue, as the Minister has this morning, that responsibility for the UK’s persistently high inflation lies in global factors, but do these figures not tell us that it actually lies much closer to home?
Baroness Penn (Con)
I am afraid I am going to have to disagree with the noble Lord. I will not cite again the figures I gave to the House a moment ago. We have heard about the IMF in this Question today. Despite the challenges we face after the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the IMF has noted that the UK has taken decisive and responsible steps to tackle inflation, and all major forecasters expect inflation to fall this year. We cannot be complacent about that, and that is why this Government’s number one priority is to bring down inflation.