King’s Speech

Lord Wakeham Excerpts

Monday 13th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wakeham (Con)]

My Lords, I enjoyed the speech of the noble Lord. I have not heard him speak before. As he said at the beginning of his speech, he has been here only about a year and I have not managed to speak in the House for quite a bit longer than a year because I have been in and out of hospital. I am now, I think, getting better, but I have my stick here in case I wobble while I am speaking.

It is interesting that when you are away from the House for a time after you have been here—in my case now, in both Houses, getting near to 50 years—you think about the things you got wrong rather than the things you got right. One of the most important sentences in the King’s excellent Speech was that we should

“make the difficult but necessary long-term decisions to change this country for the better”.

I applied that to the time when I was Secretary of State for Energy, some 30 years ago, when I privatised the electricity industry. I can forget about the things we got right; I think about the things that have not been quite right. At the time, I remember the tremendous difficulties we had and the things we had to abandon. We wanted to include nuclear power, but we were simply not able to do it because nobody could tell us what it cost to close a nuclear power station, so that was out of the question. Secondly, looking at more recent days, it is quite clear that the arrangements we then made for wind power have not really stood the test of time; I think that has to be looked at again.

The new Secretary of State therefore has two important areas to oversee. I would like to see nuclear power given a substantial revival and I would also like to see wind power. She also has to look at the wider question. One report by the Economic Affairs Committee of this House, of which I was chairman for many years, wrote about how it is thought that the economic growth in the world for the rest of this century will mean that the standard of living in the underdeveloped parts of the world will rise to the point where it will be very near the levels of the developed world. Of course, that will produce great wealth; it will probably stop people wanting to emigrate to other countries as much as they did; it will do all sorts of things and it will also add to the problems of global warming. There are some massive challenges to deal with in the years to come.

What we have probably not developed enough in the world is solar power. There is more to do. I was reading the other day, for instance, that 60% of the facilities for global solar power are in Africa and that they produce 1% of the solar power in the world. There is a lot to be done. We will go through a difficult time in which, I am pretty certain, fossil fuels will gradually die out in the end, although not as quickly as some people want. A lot of things in this world will be great for my grandchildren, let alone my children. I am delighted to be back.