King’s Speech

Debate (4th Day)

Moved on Tuesday 7 November by

That an humble Address be presented to His Majesty as follows:

“Most Gracious Sovereign—We, Your Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Lords Spiritual and Temporal in Parliament assembled, beg leave to thank Your Majesty for the most gracious Speech which Your Majesty has addressed to both Houses of Parliament”.

My Lords, on behalf of your Lordships’ House, I thank the King for delivering the gracious Speech. I am grateful for the privilege of opening today’s debate on the Motion for an humble Address.

Today, I shall outline the Government’s plans to grow the economy, to secure our energy supply for the long term, to deliver a world-class transport network for the whole of the UK, and to protect our environment. My noble friend Lady Penn will close what I am sure will be yet another spirited debate, with many important contributions from all parts of the House. My right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer will present the Autumn Statement to Parliament on 22 November. Your Lordships will be unsurprised to know that I will not pre-empt any of his announcements or the OBR’s forecast but will focus on the Government’s recent record on the economy.

Despite enormous global challenges, the UK is proving the doubters wrong. The Government have made difficult long-term decisions to restore stability and grow the economy. The best tax cut for the UK public is indeed a cut in inflation. Inflation has already fallen to 6.7% since peaking at 11.1%, and most major forecasters agree that we are on track to meet our goal of halving inflation by the end of the year, before returning it to 2% by 2025. This will enable us to create better-paid jobs and opportunities across the whole of our United Kingdom, guaranteeing a better future for the next generation.

To deliver that growth, we are creating the right environment for businesses to invest and expand. We have announced a £27 billion tax cut for business, and the UK now has the lowest corporation tax rate in the G7, as well as one of the most generous capital allowance regimes in the whole of the OECD. Our labour market reforms will also add 110,000 people to the workforce, and our extended 30 hours free childcare reforms will help to support even more people into the workplace.

At the same time, we remain on track to reduce the national debt. The independent OBR confirmed in March that debt will be falling by the end of the forecast. Reducing debt provides the essential foundations for sustainable growth, as it reduces spending on debt interest that could otherwise support essential public services. It also allows the Government space to respond to future shocks and reduces the financial pressure passed on to our children and grandchildren.

We recognise the immense challenges that British people have been facing with the cost of living. Putin’s war in Ukraine caused global economic disruption and unleashed huge energy price increases, leading to pressures on living standards. We have taken significant action over the past year to give struggling families the support they desperately need. We stepped in last winter to protect communities and businesses, spending £40 billion to help pay half the average household energy bill. Although energy prices have been steadily coming down since, we are continuing to offer support, with a £900 cost of living payment going to those on means-tested benefits. Taken together, our support to households to help with higher bills is worth £94 billion, or £3,300 per household on average, across 2022-23 and 2023-24—one of the largest household support packages in the whole of Europe.

My Lords, the King’s Speech promised to “strengthen our economy” and

“put the country on a better path”.

Such measures would indeed be welcome. The country is ready for change. Britain desperately needs national renewal, with a serious plan for growth. Yet, in reality, the King’s Speech delivered nothing of the kind. Just as with today’s reshuffle, it merely brought back more of the same.

Just as today’s reshuffle has seen the return of a man the Prime Minister himself described as part of a “record of failure”, the King’s Speech saw a continuation of a failed approach that has led to 13 years of national decline; no change from an economic model that has failed over 13 years to give working people the security and opportunity they deserve; 13 years of failure that began with the Cameron-era austerity that missed all its targets, then gave us a Brexit that broke all its promises—followed, inevitably, by a mini-Budget that gambled with people’s livelihoods, undermined our financial institutions, sent government bonds plunging and pushed the pension market to the brink of collapse; 13 years of chaos and instability that have left Britain weaker, and working people paying the price.

The Resolution Foundation has calculated that never in living memory have Britain’s families got so much poorer over the course of one Parliament, with typical working-age household incomes set to be 4% lower in 2024 than at the start of this Parliament in 2019.

Many of those families are home owners, who worked hard, saved for a deposit and have taken pride in having somewhere to call their own. But the security that that should bring, has, for many, turned to dread, as they receive letters from their lender telling them their bills are going up by hundreds of pounds a month. Interest rates have now risen 14 times to a 15-year high of 5.25%, while the average two-year fixed-rate mortgage rose from 2.6% to 6%. As a result, average mortgage holders have paid £2,900 more this year—8.3% of their disposable income. Some 1.4 million people will lose a staggering 20% of their disposable income.

My Lords, it is a pleasure to open day three of the debate on the gracious Speech from these Benches. I will be concentrating the bulk of my remarks on energy measures and will address the environment to some extent—climate change and nature being two sides of the same coin. I will restrict my remarks in the comfort and knowledge that noble friends following me are far better qualified than I am to cover the remaining topics.

I wanted to preface my disappointment with the gracious Speech by congratulating the Government on at least one item in it, so I scoured the mighty tome and found one that I approve of—the animal welfare (livestock exports) Bill. It is late, but welcome nevertheless.

I and many others were relieved that the dastardly plan to criminalise homeless people sleeping in tents and make it an offence for charities to help them had not found its way into the gracious Speech, and on that I congratulate the Government. The Home Secretary was adept at finding new ways to cast herself as a cartoon villain. She will not be missed. I am sorry that I digress a bit from the subject of today’s topics.

I jest, of course, when I refer to the gracious Speech as a “mighty tome”, because it was nothing of the sort: the legislative agenda with which we are presented is light and largely insubstantial. Before I move on to the bulk of my remarks, I express my disappointment that there was no reference to peat or the growing problem of disposable vapes. In particular, there had been hopes that the Government would address their promise to ban the sale of peat by the end of this Parliament. Implementing a comprehensive delivery mechanism to address degraded peatlands is a priority recommendation in the Climate Change Committee’s 2023 progress report, so it is a disappointment that the Government were silent on this.

Going forward, I hope that we can use the tobacco and vapes Bill to tackle disposable vapes. Aside from the damage they are doing to young people’s health, the amount of lithium that is piling high in landfills and not being recycled is criminal. The Green Alliance states that, in the past year, enough lithium to make 5,000 EV batteries was disposed of. I hope the Government will give my comments serious consideration.

My Lords, I declare my interests as chair and a director of the associated company Peers for the Planet. I will follow the noble Baroness, Lady Sheehan, in two respects. The first is to start with a positive and welcome the measures in the gracious Speech in relation to smoking and finally achieving a generation that will be smoke-free in this country. The second respect is that I will also be speaking on issues relating to climate and energy.

As the noble Baroness said, there are two separate, and arguably contradictory, elements relating to these issues in the Government’s proposals. First, there is the plan to mandate annual licensing for North Sea oil and gas drilling, which is a specific policy proposal to be underpinned by legislation. In contrast, we have much a more high-level and aspirational commitment to

“seek to attract record levels of investment in renewable energy sources and reform grid connections”

as well as to

“lead action on tackling climate change and biodiversity loss”

and

“support developing countries with their energy transition”.

These are high ambitions, but with no accompanying legislation or specific policy initiatives.

I have grave concerns about both sets of proposals: on the first, whether it is quite simply wrong in principle; and, on the second, whether it is mere words without the necessary substance behind them. Nowhere is there a commitment, which we need so badly, to provide a comprehensive, effective energy transition plan against which government proposals and government progress can be assessed.

I do not dispute, and I do not think anyone does, that we need existing oil and gas now and in the immediate future, and residual amounts once the majority of the grid is decarbonised, but the annual licensing regime proposed by the Government is, according to the FT, unlikely to reverse the dwindling reserves, a poor use of parliamentary time, and

I look forward to the maiden speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Gascoigne, and my right reverend friend the Bishop of Norwich. The gracious Speech expressed the Government’s intention to make difficult long-term decisions to build a better future for the country. I confess that I am struggling to see much evidence of that plan. To think truly long-term about our country’s future, it is vital that children and families and the environment are at the heart of every policy, particularly from the Treasury. Without prioritising investing in children, what hope is there of moulding citizens who contribute positively to society and the economic growth that this Government desire? So I welcome the Government’s plan to increase the number of those taking high-quality apprenticeships, allowing young people to pursue their varied skills, but to ensure the educational success of all children we need to prioritise their well-being inside and outside the school gates. Without this support, how can we expect them to thrive?

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s recent report Destitution in the UK 2023 revealed that around 1 million children have experienced destitution in the past year—I repeat: 1 million children have experienced not simply poverty, but destitution. This number is not inevitable. It is preventable.

Poverty limits opportunity and life chances. The implementation of the two-child limit, the benefit cap and low levels of universal credit continue to push more families into poverty, impacting their education and futures. The well-being of children and families must be at the heart of all policy decisions. The Government will soon outline their proposals to reform welfare. Will His Majesty’s Government carefully consider whether the decisions they make truly place children and families at the centre?

We also cannot abandon the urgent present needs. If these are not addressed now, they will have lasting consequences. The Trussell Trust revealed last week that over the summer it distributed record numbers of food parcels for that time of year, as well as having threateningly low levels of food-bank resources. As described by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation:

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham. We all share his aspiration to ensure that children and families are supported, but in order to do so we need to create the wealth to achieve that. Governments do not create wealth, businesses do, and I am sorry that his speech had very little about that aspect.

I shall talk about how the contents of the gracious Speech are going to be delivered and about the accountability of the Executive to Parliament. In the last Session there were 30 Ministers and Whips in this House, and 14 of them were unpaid. I thought we ended the practice of having to have private means in order to be able to serve in government in 1911. In this Parliament, one extremely effective and senior Minister of State was forced to take demotion in order to receive a reduced salary. Another able Front-Bencher gave up altogether as he could not continue unpaid. All Ministers of State in this House are now expected to work for nothing. This includes senior Defence and Foreign Office Ministers, whose duties involve travel away, and therefore they are not even able to claim the daily £300-odd allowance that is meant to cover accommodation and other necessary costs.

Unsurprisingly, the result has been that Peers are unwilling to take up ministerial office as many simply cannot afford it, while others are resentful at being asked to do so. The less than satisfactory remedy has been to appoint new but inexperienced Peers with deeper pockets, some of whom disappear after a short time in office to the Cross Benches—no names, no pack-drill.

Having served in government in the Commons for more than a decade, I am acutely aware of how much more demanding it is to be at the Dispatch Box in the House of Lords. Although politer, the questions are penetrating—even from your own side—and well-informed, and Ministers are expected to answer for the Government as a whole. Great rafts of legislation, bristling with Henry VIII clauses that have not even been discussed in the other place, surge up the Corridor for detailed consideration long after the other place has gone to bed. The House of Lords sits for longer hours than the elected House. In the last Session, 7,937 amendments to Bills were tabled and, unlike in the other place, each one is considered, with any of us free to speak with no restrictions on time—something that the Liberal Benches take full advantage of. Of those, 2,680 were government amendments accepted by the House, together with 277 opposition amendments. In contrast, as most Bills in the other place are timetabled, few if any amendments are considered and debated at all. The truth is that the other place is no longer doing its job of scrutinising legislation effectively and holding the Executive to account. There is much talk of reform of the House of Lords, but the Lords is working, working hard and doing a good job; it is the other place that is in need of reform.

My Lords, I never thought I would agree with a contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, but I do.

This was a deeply disappointing King’s Speech—the first, and quite possibly the last, by this lame-duck illegitimate Prime Minister. There was no mention of an employment Bill, promised in the 2019 gracious Speech and over 20 times since by Ministers but now forgotten. Instead, we are going backwards on workers’ rights, with new strike-busting laws to be in place by Christmas.

I remind noble Lords that, at the last election, the party opposite promised to raise standards in employment rights and make Britain the very best place to work in Europe. But rather than raising standards, the Government have undermined workers’ rights, notwithstanding the valiant efforts from across all sides of your Lordships’ House during the passage of the retained EU law Act—efforts which saved us from falling off a legislative cliff edge at the end of this year. I say well done to noble Lords.

We fought hard in this House, but we were not strong enough to stop the Government lifting the ban on using agency staff to break strike action. Thankfully, the High Court agreed with noble Lords and quashed these changes. It is a shame that Ministers did not listen to this House, saving themselves the embarrassment of acting unlawfully, not to mention the public money that was wasted. But it is the anti-strikes Act—that is what it should be called—that now threatens to throw Britain into major industrial unrest. This pernicious legislation, which this House fought so hard against, could see millions of workers lose the most basic industrial right of all—the right to withdraw their own labour—with workers forced to cross their own picket lines and their trade unions legally obliged to enforce this. This is nothing short of scandalous, and the Government have not wasted any time, with new legislation soon set to make it impossible for rail, ambulance and border staff to take any kind of effective strike action.

My Lords, the Government’s backsliding on climate action is a deeply damaging mistake, damaging for the UK, the world and the future of us all. It is a mistake founded on a whole series of muddled and incorrect arguments.

First, on the science, the Government speak as if the issue is simply about achieving net zero at mid-century, when what matters is the path to net zero and the total of emissions over time. Rapid reduction is crucial. The Government speak of “maxing out” from the North Sea, and thus appear to fail to understand that the Paris goals imply that much of the fossil fuels already discovered must be left in the ground. The Government also leave the impression that they have not understood the immense dangers of delay. I argued 17 years ago in the Stern review that the science told us that inaction was costly and dangerous. Let us not waste any more time.

Secondly, on energy, any actions on exploration which started now would lead to the production of oil and gas primarily in the next decade. For the Paris goals, the world’s consumption of oil would need to be around 60 million barrels a day 10 to 15 years from now, relative to the 100 of today. I refer, for example, to the work of the International Energy Agency. If oil consumption reduces, as it must, higher-cost producers will be forced out of the market; that would include most of UK production. Gas consumption must fall rapidly too. The alternative to these arguments is to claim that oil and gas would not be so reduced—in other words, to bet on the failure of Paris. That outcome would be disastrous for our children and grandchildren.

Thirdly, on security, the Government appear to believe that extracting oil and gas from the North Sea would deliver energy security—yet another confusion. That production is by the private sector and sold on world markets, as has already correctly been argued. It would, in large measure, be refined outside the UK. That it could be commandeered for UK use is simply not credible. We should also be clear that UK output has a negligible effect on world prices. Energy insecurity has come from dependence on fossil fuels, much of it produced in unstable parts of the world. Energy security will come from a rapid replacement of those sources. Renewables, with storage, already produce cheaper electricity than fossil fuels.