Queen’s Speech

Lord Newby Excerpts

Tuesday 11th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby (LD)]

My Lords, I join other speakers in expressing my thanks to, and admiration of, the Queen for delivering the speech today. Her sense of public duty is an example for us all.

I congratulate the mover and seconder of the humble Address. I first met the noble Lord, Lord Bates, on his appointment as a Minister in the coalition Government, when I briefed him on how to prepare for questions from the Dispatch Box. Despite my advice, he became a most accomplished performer in your Lordships’ House, as his very thoughtful speech today so ably demonstrates. On this side of the House, we miss him from the Government Front Bench; perhaps one day he will return.

The noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson of Welton, in her short time in the House, has already shown herself to be warm hearted, well informed and constructive, not least in her contributions on the Domestic Abuse Bill. Her speech today underlined those credentials, and we look forward very much to hearing her further in your Lordships’ House.

At the time of the last Queen’s Speech, in December 2019, most of us could not even spell coronavirus, much less imagine that the pandemic would utterly dominate our lives and political debate for the next 18 months. For many in our society, coronavirus has been a tragedy; many have died or been left with the debilitating effects of long Covid, and many families have had to face the consequences—and our thoughts are with them today. But for many more people, the complete dislocation of normal life that the pandemic has brought has led them to re-evaluate their priorities. What is most important to them? What might they change so that the way they live their lives reflects their readjusted priorities?

We have seen the outcome of this re-evaluation in many ways. The majority no longer want the daily commute. Living outside the capital has gained a new attraction. More people want to work for the NHS. More people want to volunteer in their local community. More people have a greater understanding of their local environment and want to enhance it—and we all now more fully appreciate the value of family and friends. In a nutshell, more people are more concerned about their overall well-being and that of their family and their local community, and realise that while a good job and a decent income are crucial, there is more to a full life than that.

These impulses have been felt wherever the pandemic struck, and some Governments have sought to use the terrible experience of the past 15 months as a spur to do things differently. We see this perhaps most notably in the US, where President Biden has seized the moment to think big and provide extra help for the poor, minorities and women, while creating jobs, rebuilding infrastructure and improving the provision of education and childcare—and he is proposing to pay for it by raising taxes on those who can best afford it. Such a vision is completely lacking in today’s Queen’s Speech. The Queen’s Speech contains many Bills of second-order importance but none offering fundamental change. To the extent that more public expenditure is planned, the Government are completely silent as to how it might be financed. Promising to return the public finances to a sustainable path is fine as far as it goes, but if the Government are to meet their stated public spending aims, this will, as in the US, require tax rises. What are they to be? We have no idea.

I readily accept that the Government had some successes in last week’s elections, principally on the back of the success of the vaccination programme, and allegedly the Prime Minister is to follow up today’s speech with a speech about what the Government plan to do to stop the brain drain to the cities. But this smacks of a tactical move to try to consolidate Conservative gains in some northern and Midlands seats. It does not amount to a vision for the country. In any event, speeches are only so much hot air unless they are followed up by effective action, and here, the Prime Minister’s track record is poor. I will take just three examples: social care, historic fire safety defects, and Brexit.

On social care, the Government yet again promise action but no legislation. They clearly have no plan. The Prime Minister claims to be interested in adopting the approach proposed by the Dilnot report, but the coalition legislated to implement a version of Dilnot, and it was dropped in 2015 by the Conservative Government. It is not exactly new. The ostensible problem now, unsurprisingly, is funding, but this is a classic case where you cannot have your cake and eat it. If you want a fair, workable and durable solution, you have to pay for it, but there is clearly no agreement within government about how to do so.

On historic building safety defects, the Prime Minister has said:

“We are determined that no leaseholder should have to pay for the unaffordable … defects that they did not cause and are no fault of their own.”—[Official Report, Commons, 3/2/21; col. 945.]


Yet the Government simply are not proposing anything to prevent hundreds of thousands of people having to pay unmanageable bills. On a daily basis now, individual leaseholders are receiving massive bills which will force some into bankruptcy or homelessness. Many more will not be able to sell their houses, and the housing associations will have to curtail their building programmes because all spare funds will have to deal with fire safety issues on existing blocks. The debates on the Fire Safety Bill showed that the Government have no proposals that even begin to match the scale of this impending crisis, and the building safety Bill, whenever it comes, promises to offer too little, too late.

On Brexit—the most infamous case of the Prime Minister wanting to have his cake and eat it—we now see the consequences. Whether it is the problems around trade across the Irish Sea, the failure to protect the fishing industry, or the inability of musicians and other creative artists to travel freely to work in the EU, the costs are clear but the benefits remain elusive. Partial trade deals with countries with which we do a small fraction of our trade compared to that with the EU simply do not cut it.

If the Government were alive to the post-Covid opportunities facing the country, they would start measuring well-being alongside GDP. They would be transferring greater powers and resources to regions and cities. They would have a long-term fix for the funding of health and social care. They would be providing enhanced funding for education and training provision, which is so inadequate in many of our poorer areas. They would have a comprehensive plan for decarbonising homes. They would be making it easier for people to participate in elections, rather than requiring photo identity at polling stations. They would be honest with people about the cost of providing the public services they expect and deserve. They would be giving NHS staff a proper pay rise, not the prospect of another great reorganisation. They would be reinstating our commitment to 0.7% of GNI for international development. They would be encouraging the 750,000 people who volunteered to help in the Covid crisis to continue supporting community activities in the places where they live. If they do want to build 300,000 houses a year, they would be setting about training the workforce needed to make this possible, not making potentially damaging changes to planning law. But they are doing none of these things.

There is an old adage about not wasting a crisis, but the Covid crisis gave this Government a massive opportunity to change for the better the way we do things as a society, and they are wasting it.