Water Bill

Debate between Lord Moynihan and Lord Haskel

Tuesday 8th April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for providing a comprehensive solution to the issue of exit, for tabling these amendments and for his clear explanation of the Government’s intent. While the legislative drafting is more extensive than some of us had anticipated, these amendments achieve the desired effect of facilitating a clearer framework for competition. Additionally, the greater transparency on cost allocation that such a voluntary transfer mechanism brings will help to ensure that the incumbent companies are less able to adjust their cost allocations to the detriment of household customers.

This transparency is fundamental to effective economic regulation and the policing of effective markets. It will allow companies to organise their businesses in the way that they consider to be in the best interests of their shareholders and indeed their customers. Allowing exit to occur voluntarily, as confirmed by the Minister, will allow transfer mechanisms to enable more competitive third parties to enter the non-household water and sewerage retail market to the benefit of business customers, as has proved to be the case in Scotland. Above all, as demonstrated by both Oxera and Macquarie, exit will save customers unnecessary cost.

I am very grateful to the Government for confirming today that they will now consult fully on safeguards, consulting particularly with those who represent the interests of the customers, given that the powers granted through these amendments confirm the opportunity, not the obligation, for incumbent water and sewerage companies to propose transfer schemes to the Secretary of State for his consideration.

As tabled, the amendments place a considerable degree of power in the hands of Ministers, notably to adjust the powers and duties of key industry stakeholders, including Ofwat. While this could be problematic were the powers to be used to their full extent, I am confident from what the Minister has said that there is absolutely no intention to undermine the freedom of manoeuvre of the regulator.

With the clauses soon to be in the Bill, I hope, it will be important to enter into constructive discussion and engagement in order to consult widely and urgently to meet what I hope will be the reasonable deadline of market opening in 2017. I also agree with noble Lords who emphasised at an earlier stage that it is also very important to secure customer protection on retail exit.

I hope that the amendments will be welcomed on all sides of the House and by all those who have taken part in the debates over exit, with the request that the Government will give a firm and unequivocal commitment to using their new powers to facilitate efficient and orderly market entry and exit. If so, the benefits will be considerable for business customers. Once this House, in future legislation, has the opportunity to review the working of the market for business customers, I hope that it will not subsequently hesitate to move forward to deliver competition to the household sector as well.

[Lord Haskel (Lab)]

My Lords, has the Minister seen the report from the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee? It is quite critical of these amendments. The committee found that the amendments were prepared in a hurry, and was particularly concerned that the procedure should have a strengthened affirmative procedure. I was not sure from the Minister’s introduction whether he was giving an undertaking that this would be so, or indeed whether he accepts this recommendation from the committee. The committee also found that the powers are conferred in rather permissive terms and, where regulations must make provision, the committee suggested that the regulations should be required to make provision. Again, I did not quite gather from the Minister’s introductory words whether he had taken these recommendations on board.

Olympic and Paralympic Games 2012

Debate between Lord Moynihan and Lord Haskel

Monday 21st May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan]

My Lords, I start where my noble friend Lady Doocey finished by recognising London 2012 as a story of great achievement, great British creativity and great British involvement. The fact that the Olympic park was completed on time and on budget is to a great extent thanks to the skill and professionalism of more than 1,000 British businesses. The Olympic Delivery Authority’s contract for the construction of the Olympic stadium resulted in work for 240 UK companies, with many more subcontractors. This included the supply of steel from Bolton, turf grown in Scunthorpe and seats from Luton. More than 40 UK companies won contracts to work on the velodrome, including supplying the timber for the cycling track from Sheffield and seating structures from Barnsley.

The Olympic and Paralympic Games have been a catalyst for delivering this urban regeneration of the East End in six years rather than 26. My noble friend in sport, the noble Baroness, Lady Ford, has been the torch bearer in the project to steer that area of London into a vibrant urban legacy for future generations—I emphasise that to my noble friend Lady Doocey—of the local communities. That has been at the heart of everything she has done, for which she deserves the congratulations and support of us all.

We are now ready for 15,000 athletes from more than 200 countries to come to both the Olympic and Paralympic Games. They will be competing for 4,400 medals. More than 3,000 officials will preside over the world’s fiercest competition and—would you believe it?—20,000 accredited media will carry the action to billions of people around the world. We are holding the equivalent of 26 world championships at the same time over 19 days, transitioning the city and then holding another 20 world championships for the Paralympic Games over 12 days. More than £700-million worth of goods will be procured for the Games, including 900,000 pieces of sports equipment—every one to perfection. For example, there are 8,400 badminton shuttlecocks, 6,000 paper archery target faces and 510 hurdles for the athletes. We expect around 8 million spectators, with 800,000 people expected to use public transport to travel to the Games on the busiest day. I say to my noble friend Lord Davies that, of course, transport is a concern and security has also been expressed as a concern. However, to have an investment because of the Games of some £6.5 billion, not least in upgrading and extending transport links to get people to and from the Games, to ensure that London keeps moving, is surely beneficial both for the Games and as a legacy project.

I shall refer to the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Haskel; I was going to say my noble friend, as he frequently is on the subject of sport. He raised an important issue. I am not here to defend the definition of a breakfast menu; nor, I am sure he would accept, am I here to argue over the margins of the legal definition of ambush marketing. I hope that I can give him some comfort by saying this from the London organising committee perspective. It raised some £2 billion from the private sector to put into the Games. That has come not least from TV rights and, of course, ticket sales. Above all, it has come from sponsorship rights. Protecting those sponsorship rights is inherently important in retaining the value of that essential contribution to a £2 billion package which has not resorted to government funding.

I think that the noble Lord was focusing more on the future. In that context maybe I can give him some comfort as I have a good degree of sympathy with his point. At the end of this year, the rights will return from the London organising committee to the British Olympic Association. We are in discussion at this time—well in advance of the end of the year—to see how we can showcase British expertise among the contractors and subcontractors who have been involved with the project, to ensure that they get some recognition moving forward, without losing the right of those commercial advantages that the British Olympic Association will have to support the young athletes of the future once the Games have moved on from London 2012. The noble Lord makes a very important point but I give him the assurance that we are already in discussion with those contractors, such as Sir John Armitt—he has been critical in this, as the noble Lord knows—and with the Government to see whether we can find a solution to recognise and showcase the outstanding work that has been done for these Games, and to work with those companies to make sure that not only they succeed but that young athletes in the future are given the support they so richly deserve when it comes to moving on to future Olympic and Paralympic Games.

[Lord Haskel]

I thank the noble Lord for that reassurance, but the point that is being continuously made to me is that the Olympic city itself is a wonderful shop window and it is not allowed to use the Olympics as such.

[Lord Moynihan]

I have made a distinction, I hope, in trying to assist the noble Lord about what happens when those rights return to the British Olympic Association. He made a very important point about the future benefit to those companies being showcased for the work that they have done and what is happening today. What is happening today is clearly a matter for the legal department and, as I say, I am not here to defend a legal department that is looking in detail at the definition of a breakfast menu. However, I am very concerned as chairman of the British Olympic Association that companies that have done a huge amount of work for these Games should be able to showcase in the future and win further contracts in the future. Sports facilities around the world are a multimillion-pound business, and it does not end with the Games in London. For them, it is the beginning of a long road, and we should be there to support them on that road. We need to get the balance right between ensuring their recognition—which is important to their business—on the one hand, and on the other the return of the rights of the British Olympic Association, which for over one hundred years had to rely purely on private sector funding; there was not a pound from government in those hundred years. The only way to do this is through the sale of the rights through sponsorship. I believe that we can achieve that balance.

I will move on to the work of the Government. The House should have nothing but praise for the Minister for Sport and the Olympics, Hugh Robertson. He fought for our athletes in maintaining funding for our Olympic and Paralympic teams after London 2012, going into the Rio cycle. He has boosted the credentials of this country to make sure that we have a decade of sport, by supporting our successful bids—and I emphasise that all these have been successful—to host the Rugby League World Cup in 2013; the Commonwealth Games, of course, in 2014; the Rugby Union World Cup in 2015; the World Athletics Championships in the Olympic stadium in 2017, and what a magnificent achievement it was to win that bid; and, not least after our great victory today, the Cricket World Cup in 2019. This will be a decade of sport for the United Kingdom.

However, Hugh Robertson will not be short of future challenges when the curtain falls on the Olympic and Paralympic Games. There is a need to restructure British sport. It is still a myriad of too many quangos and of public sector-driven and overlapping bureaucracy. I have always believed that the role of government in sport is to empower, not to micromanage. Where sport is at its best, it is driven from the athletes up, with the support and enthusiasm of their parents, families, friends, clubs and schools. It provides the ideal opportunity to implement the Prime Minister’s earlier objective of “big society, not big government”. The months after the Games will provide the best chance in a generation for fundamental reform. A leader like Hugh Robertson, who has won respect across the sporting world, has the ability to take on the forces of the past and deliver a true sporting legacy for the future. However, delivery of that sporting legacy will be our biggest challenge.

Against this background, the British Olympic Association will continue to perform its role as an independent voice for sport. When the Government, the mayor’s office’s attention and the Olympic movement move on and LOCOG is disbanded, we will still be there for the athletes. It is my view that sport holds a mirror to society. The values of sport reflect the values of society. Many of the principles and ideals inherent in sport have a broader application to our lives as a whole. The standards of probity and integrity in sport should mirror the highest standards of behaviour in society. The corresponding forms of sanction and discipline should apply if that behaviour is flouted. Keenly contested though it is, winning at any cost is inimical to the very essence of sport and to its philosophy of team spirit, honesty and loyalty.

The concept of fair play is one of sport’s most cherished tenets. Cheating, by whatever means, from overt fouling to match fixing to doping, is not fair play and has no place in sport. On 7 November last year, the greatest living Olympian, Sir Steve Redgrave, stated, with reference to the World Anti-Doping Agency:

“A two-year ban for doping is almost saying that it’s acceptable”.

He was speaking for clean athletes across the globe. Yet last month was marked by a deeply disappointing development. The Court of Arbitration of Sport formally declared the British Olympic Association’s lifetime ban for serious drugs cheats unenforceable. That effectively denied the British Olympic Association the autonomy to select Team GB athletes. We held a special meeting of all the governing bodies of sport to consider the effect of the ruling. There was a universal condemnation of the World Anti-Doping Agency’s decision to reduce to two years the bans for first-time offences. Let us hope that it is not tantamount—as postulated by my noble friend Lord Higgins—to giving a green light to the use of drugs in sport. If this proves to be the case, and nothing is done to stem the tide, we will drift inexorably towards a sporting world in which competition between athletes is equally competition between chemists’ laboratories. At the British Olympic Association and in the corridors of the IOC, national Olympic committees and international federations, we may have lost the battle. However, on behalf of the athletes whose interests we represent, we must win the war.

My noble friend Lord Higgins suggested that the benefits of performance-enhancing drugs may pass and go away during a period of two years. That may be a seriously wrong observation. If I had taken growth hormones throughout my teens and had ended up six feet tall like my noble friend Lord Bates, I guarantee that I would not have shrunk back to my present height in my 20s. That was a light-hearted way of making a serious point. If one takes a cocktail of drugs to enhance one’s performance in training and can do eight, nine or 10 times more circuit training in the winter than one would otherwise have done without those drugs, even when one comes off the drugs one can attain high performance levels with the muscular structure one has now acquired illegally by taking the performance-enhancing drugs, sometimes for a very long time. The case of growth hormones is extremely important, especially for people in their teens.