Queen’s Speech

Lord Patten Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten]

My Lords, certainly in my part of the south-western dairying country, what the right reverend Prelate has just said will go down very well—“Bishop calls for speedy badger cull”. They will like that very much in my part of Somerset.

In declaring my current business and financial interests, I wish to concentrate on four paragraphs only in the gracious Speech: paragraph 2 on the deficit; paragraphs 3 and 7 together on regulation; and, finally, the last paragraph, which prefigures other measures that might be laid before your Lordships’ House.

Turning, first, to the deficit in paragraph 2, I strongly support the Government’s policies. That is a rather unfashionable position to take in the debate this afternoon in the face of the newly fashionable anti-austerity, pro-growth-at-any-cost consensus that seems to be sweeping across Europe and its political community. So far as concerns the deficit, I believe that we must stay the course. We have not yet really begun to deal with the effects of cutting Labour’s increase in public expenditure of more than a half in real terms when it was in office. To start swerving before the rubber has even begun to hit the road would be a self-inflicted political, as well as economic, act, waving goodbye to our AAA rating and saying hello and welcome to the bond market barbarians who are at our gates at the moment watching for the first sign of exactly this sort of capitulation by the United Kingdom.

If we need our deficit-reducing backbone stiffening, we need look no further than France, where meeting the deficit target of 3% of GDP by the end of 2013 is going to demand an extra €24 billion or €25 billion in terms of changes to be found via expenditure cuts and/or tax increases. I am afraid that even in France there are not enough bankers’ bonuses to go round to meet that sum. Therefore, we need to look to our own devices in our own businesses to help with faster deficit reduction and to help to fight our way out of the current double-dip recession. One of those ways is through regulatory reform. Often this can be done through a set of minor measures but they lead to great help for our businesses.

That leads me to paragraphs 3 and 7 in the gracious Speech. I know that the coalition realises that businesses, both large and small, are its friends—or should be—for they have in place much to help us grow again. Many corporates have healthy balance sheets, healthy cash piles and considerable confidence in their own businesses —at least, the businesses that they run. They work hard, as Ministers do. I sometimes worry that both business men and women and Ministers work too hard over too long hours and do not leave themselves enough thinking time. At the same time, those in the business world welcome the encouragement that coalition Ministers give them through, for example, leading export promotion delegations abroad, when Ministers and businesses work very hard together. It is just that at the moment those same businesspeople do not necessarily feel confident enough to pull the investment trigger, particularly those with exposure to Europe and the problems faced there, and particularly also those faced with recession at home and what some would argue is a sclerotic banking lending system, with a shrinking money supply and so on, to which little list businesses would add regulation.

Therefore, on the plus side of the measures in paragraphs 3 and 7 in the gracious Speech are the excellent proposals to overhaul employment tribunals here, as well as repealing some unnecessary regulations there. That is good. On the minus side are some potentially burdensome new rules, such as rights to flexible employment, extending time off via shared parental leave and so on. There is no doubt that this is great news for the beneficiaries but it is less great news for employers, as it will put heavier burdens on job creators.

Just as my hard-working and incisive right honourable friend Mr Francis Maude is busy reducing the number of quangos, lo and behold up pops in paragraph 7 of the gracious Speech the man or woman who is to be the groceries code adjudicator—something that I would certainly recognise as a quango. I do not know whether your Lordships have all received one of these but the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills favoured at least some people, and certainly me, by kindly sending an illustrated booklet about this new quango. The centrefold contains a quite lurid close-up picture, without any explanation of why it is there, of that very staple of the lunchboxes of working Britons—the imported and very expensive fennel bulb. There is no mention of why the fennel bulb is picked on in this document. We may learn later from the Minister about our Government’s fennel policies. The only thing that is mentioned is that the adjudicator will be protecting suppliers abroad, as well as at home, so there will doubtless be dancing in the fennel-producing fields of Mediterranean Europe tonight when they know that this adjudicator is going to look after their needs.

Do all these measures taken together—a bit less regulation here, more regulation there—equal a carefully balanced package, as I would like to think, or is there some self-contradiction, as I rather suspect? Whatever the answer, the instinct to regulate is still deeply embedded in our governmental genes. Ministers for deregulation are soon outfoxed. Deregulation tsars come and go, make speeches at party conferences and platforms, both parties calling for this and that, and are strangled shortly afterwards. Rising civil servants know that to swim against the regulatory tide is not to guarantee a clear path to becoming a Permanent Secretary. Therefore, I am concerned that we are continuing to have difficulty in getting a balanced approach to regulation.

I turn to the last paragraph of the gracious Speech, which prefigures, through a legislative glass darkly, what might come in due course in terms of new legislation in this Session. Emerging through the legislative gloom, I would still like to see sensible economic measures to promote non-inflationary and non-bond market disturbing growth; for example, measures to bring forward legislation to enable High Speed 2 to be built soonest in the interests of easing our sclerotic land transport system—it is going to happen so why the delay?—and measures to build a third runway at Heathrow soonest in the interests of ensuring that our equally sclerotic air transport gateway is relieved of the problems that face it. That is beginning to damage our reputation and, increasingly, to inhibit our economic growth. A few decades ago, we missed the chance to build a third London airport at a site like Cublington. I think we would be deluded to wait decades more for some new estuarine airport down the Thames. It would come too late to have any effect at all in the pressing need for a world-class airport. We should simply build runway 3 soonest.

There is so much that the coalition can do in collaboration with hard-working businesses in areas like this, but I would like to end on a note which sometimes bishops do not trespass on, a spiritual note. I repeat that it is very important that hard-working Ministers, like hard-working businessmen, leave themselves enough time to think and to contemplate. My noble friend Lord Waldegrave of North Hill, who is not in his place today, says that he believes that it is impossible to think consistently about an issue for more than two minutes without resting one’s mental equipment. Thinking time is sometimes just as important as working time.