Housing and Planning Bill

Debate between Lord Young of Cookham and Lord Tope

Thursday 10th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

I understand the point that the noble Lord is making but he may recall an intervention that I made on Tuesday: the trouble with the alternative means of funding the commitment is that it increases the PSBR. There, you hit another real constraint from the Treasury in delivering the Government’s overall macroeconomic policy.

[Lord Tope (LD)]

My Lords, we have very many reasons to be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, but I suspect that in years to come he may well be remembered most for giving us the term “manifesto fundamentalism”. I was going to attempt to define it, but the noble Lord has just done so in a very much better way than I could. Maybe it is something like “the irrational adherence to a manifesto detail when there is a demonstrably better way of achieving the greater policy objective in that manifesto”. I am sure that, over time, others will be able to refine that definition more, but I think that that is what we are talking about—an irrational adherence to a clearly poor way of achieving the objective.

My noble friend Lady Bakewell at the beginning of the debate—

[Lord Young of Cookham]

Does the noble Lord think that the commitment on tuition fees may possibly fall into that definition?