Industrial Strategy

Lord Wrigglesworth Excerpts

Monday 8th January 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wrigglesworth (LD)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to follow the noble Lord, Lord Bhattacharyya. I very much agree with what he said, and I very much welcome this debate and the publication of the Government’s White Paper. It deserves support right across the spectrum, and that is what I want to talk about. Before I came into this place, I spent quite a lot of years as the chairman of one of our biggest ports and more than 20 years building industrial estates, largely in the north of England. That experience shows—and many other industries demonstrate the same thing—that you need long-term investment, long-term decision-making and certainty. You will not always be able to get all of those things, but the more you can get, the more successful you can be. I hope that this White Paper will bring certainty to people in all the sectors that have been mentioned.

There have been some excellent proposals for strengthening the White Paper during the course of this debate, not least the suggestion of strengthening the languages sector, and others as well. What has bedevilled our industrial strategy and a large section of our economic policy over the past 50 years and more has been the ideological divide that has split the political community and divided the community in the country. I do not share the view of the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, and one or two others, that that divide has gone away. Indeed, if Greg Clark has been reappointed as Secretary of State I am absolutely delighted because I think he has been a very good Secretary of State. I have to say that he canvassed for me when he was an SDP member and got me returned to Parliament in 1983, so I have a certain prejudice in his favour. This represents what I believe is a consensus view right across the spectrum among most people.

Looking back over the period, the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy, estimated how many industrial strategies there had been. It was one of my predecessors as the Member for Stockton, Harold Macmillan, who first introduced Neddy, the NEDC, and the little Neddies that followed. We have had a succession of industrial strategies and attempts to develop our industry and economy over all those years, and they have been held up, stopped and done damage, in some instances, because there has not been a consensus behind them. I fear that that consensus is still not there. People forget that the Secretary of State’s predecessor, Mr Sajid Javid, took a very different view on these matters from that of Greg Clark. He started rolling back with great verve all that Vince Cable had done in the previous five years. Vince Cable was the longest serving Secretary of State since Peter Thorneycroft in the 1950s, but Sajid Javid wanted to reject any idea of “picking winners”. He was using all the old verbiage of the past that has been referred to by other speakers in the debate, other noble Lords. It just demonstrates that those ideological views that undermine a White Paper such as this are still around.

We are confronted with the possibility of a Labour Party, now led by a Marxist, returning to nationalisation and causing, again, the polarisation that, in my view, caused such damage to our industrial policy in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s and, indeed, to some crucial industries, such as the steel industry, pitched backwards and forwards between the public sector and the private sector. We must not go back to that again. If we are to get certainty and long-term planning, there needs to be a political consensus. My appeal is that those in this Chamber and elsewhere in politics seek to bring that consensus behind the White Paper so that we can make a success of it. That also applies—this is something I have spent most of my life involved in—to that devolvement to the regions in which the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, has played an enormous, very positive and successful role.

When I look at what has happened in the northern region during my time, 40 or 50 years ago we had the North of England Development Council, then we went on to the Northern Development Company, then we went on to the regional development agencies and now we have gone on to the LEPs. It has been change, change, change and division, division, division. That has not helped the development of that regional economy. We have a very good position on Teesside now, again helped by the noble Lord, Lord Heseltine, and all the work that the department, helped by him, has done. We now have a combined authority there, a Conservative mayor on Teesside, co-operating closely with Labour local authorities and really making a difference.

However, up the road from there, on Tyneside, we have complete chaos, where the Labour local authorities cannot agree with one another what should happen. North of the river, they are talking about setting up a combined authority, but all the authorities on the south side of the river want nothing to do with it. The port of which I was chairman, on Tyneside, has interests on both sides of the river: an international passenger terminal and a cruise terminal on one side of the river and lots of other facilities and big docks on the other side. One side would be in a combined authority, the other will be in different authorities on the other side of the river. It is going to make it much more difficult for that organisation—a big and important economic unit in the north-east—to function effectively and efficiently.

Yes, we want what the White Paper is saying—to devolve power down—and, yes, it has been successful in many areas, as the noble Lord said, but there is much further to go, and we will go further only if we can bring about that political consensus, at both local and national level, to give us the certainty in the long term that the success of this policy can bring. I hope that everything will be done by Members in this Chamber, the other Chamber and elsewhere in politics to try to unite people around this policy. It has many useful assets. The balance between the public sector and the private sector is laid out extremely well. The noble Lord, Lord Prior, put as powerful a case for an industrial strategy as you could find. There is a tremendous amount of evidence and of well-defined activity in the White Paper, which, if it is carried out, can be of enormous benefit to the country, but we need the support of all parties and all people to make a success of it.