Finance Bill

Lord Wei Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard) & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee negatived (Hansard) & Committee negatived (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 17th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wei (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I refer Members to my interests, as well as to an article I wrote recently in “ConservativeHome” which expands in greater detail on some of the topics I want to cover today.

I welcome the Bill and the measures that the Government have taken over the last months to deal with this unprecedented crisis. There is much to applaud within policies such as furloughing and tax breaks—ensuring that cash can get to as many of those affected as possible so they can survive the coming months.

Of course, we are now starting to turn and look up a little further out to the coming months and rebooting our economy—bouncing back, as it has been called. I am a bit concerned that, with all the talk of bouncing back in a greener way, which is important, and levelling up, which remains rightly a priority across the country, there is an assumption in so much of our thinking at the moment, and certainly in the Bill, around normal returning. If I am wrong and what I am about to say will not happen, what a relief. However, I fear that we are entering a phase in our nation’s and the world’s history of much greater volatility. Some of that is climate driven and is obviously geopolitical. Again, with this issue of viruses, it is now cheap and becoming cheaper to manufacture viruses. I am fearful that this may not be the only one. Perhaps we will deal with this one, and perhaps there will be a lockdown in winter, or not.

My question—which I mentioned in my article—is: do we need now to have another lens, which is to look at resilience? We have had our Dunkirk and we scraped through. Millions were affected and there were huge losses, personally, in human terms, and financially. However, what will we do to make sure that this never happens again? Even if there are lockdowns in future, why will we still allow millions of people to be reliant only on work that can be done physically? I therefore welcome, for example, the Government’s policies around boosting apprenticeships; how can that be done in a way to give people resilience? How can we have less centralised healthcare so that the huge machines in hospitals can be shrunk down with better technology so that they can be closer to people’s homes or even in their homes? There is also education, supply chains and agriculture—I do not have time to go through them all. There is an opportunity potentially for this nation to become a leader in redesigning our systems so that they can work even in volatile emergency situations like this. In fact, the internet was invented to deal with emergencies like this.

How can we move our entire country forward in a way that makes something of an opportunity to help other countries deal with future crises like this? Perhaps in so doing, we may not quite end up with some of the tax issues, the debt burden and some of the productivity issues. Instead, we can become a leader in being a resilient country to ensure that those who have fewer resources than us will be better able to weather the next pandemic or crisis that hits us.