Economy: Government Policies

Lord Vinson Excerpts

Wednesday 7th December 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, what my right honourable friend the Chancellor said we would do is to stick precisely to the spending plans that he set out in the March Budget and the subsequent spending review. That is what we will do, and that is what will keep our interest rates low.

[Lord Vinson]

My Lords, as part of their measures to see what can help this poor old country out of its troubles, would the Government look at our huge imbalance of trade—currently running at about £30 billion a year plus? I am not suggesting for one moment that all those jobs could be done in this country, but it is the equivalent of about 1 million jobs that we are shipping overseas. There are some areas of our economy that could be done here. For instance, why do we need to import so much cement, which we can make in this country just as well as importing it from other countries? Could we not look at a sensible policy of import substitution to try to create jobs in this country that are being created unnecessarily in other countries, when we could do the jobs perfectly well ourselves?

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, our exporters are leading the growth in this country and indeed, although it is early days, there are some signs from the figures over the past 18 months that at last, after a decade of a declining share of world trade, the UK’s share is increasing. It is a modest increase and it is early days but our exporters are performing very strongly.