Defence Sector Banking Services: Environmental, Social and Governance Rules

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Monday 26th October 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pitt-Watson (Lab)]

I think that is also covered in the FCA letter. One can overdo how significant ESG disclosures and regimes have been in preventing investment in defence. At one time, that was an issue, and there has been some concern among supporters of allowing ESG investment, along with some reform. My co-author, Stephen Davis, of Harvard Law School, is among those who has campaigned on this. I note that RUSI agrees that ESG disclosure regimes generally do not prevent investment in defence, and the push now being given by the FCA is the right next step for us to take to ensure that defence companies are treated in exactly the same way as any other companies seeking finance.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

Will the Minister confirm that the sentiments he has expressed apply equally to any anti-Israel prejudice that is preventing proper investment in defence, and that the Government should lead the way by not putting any obstacles in the way of the supply of and co-operation with Israeli intelligence in our defence mechanisms?

[Lord Pitt-Watson (Lab)]

The FCA is saying—and I agree with it—that there are no rules that exclude financial services from a company solely because it operates in the defence sector. If an individual company wishes to take that into account, it should do so proportionately and consistently, and those rules should be clear to those who are approaching it. If any noble Lords would like me to send them a copy of what the FCA is asking to be done, drop me an email and I will make sure my office sends it to them. This is a significant step forward on what has been an important issue, and I again thank the Members of this House who have been raising it. This is the right response, and a solid one.

Higher Earners: Emigration

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Thursday 21st May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am happy to say that that is probably not a matter for me.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, is not the problem that the people who are fairly paying their tax feel that they unfairly have to support a vast number—maybe just as many—who are living on welfare and benefits, and that the people who work hard have to support those who do not? I sense a growing feeling of unfairness.

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I would just point out to the noble Baroness that the vast majority of people on benefits, as she puts it, are also in work—working hard every day to provide for their families. It is quite right that the state should help them to do so.

Autumn Budget 2025

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, this is a Budget that punishes anyone who tries to do the right thing. I have driven electric cars for 10 years, only to find that there is no benefit. I would not blame anyone who now decided to buy a petrol car while they can.

The Prime Minister hails the abolition of the two-child benefit cap as a moral advance towards reducing child poverty. Yet it could equally well be said that it is immoral when working families have to support those who have more children than they do without counting the cost or working. This is not the fairest and most effective way to tackle poverty. The cap reflected fairness. Taxpayers should not subsidise family size choices that they themselves funded.

Critics argue that children should not suffer for birth circumstances. This is true, but welfare generosity has overridden good parenting aims and work incentives. Evidence shows that removing the cap could reduce employment incentives. By 2026, an out-of-work family with three children will get more in benefits than a working household on the national living wage. For single parents, the gap is equally true. We can all see that work does not pay and there is no disincentive to dependency on benefits.

Lifting the cap does nothing to address deeper causes of poverty. Consider child maintenance. As of March, parents owed nearly £493 million in unpaid support, leaving more than 300,000 children without legally owed payments. The Child Maintenance Service has failed to enforce compliance, with hundreds of millions in arrears. One in five separated parents fails to pay full child maintenance. Enforcing maintenance payments would move 100,000 children out of absolute low income each year. It is almost taboo to say that Governments should not be incentivising family break-ups and unstable cohabitation arrangements. They need attention. I ask the Government to help the Child Maintenance Service get the money for these children.

Child poverty is predictable. Tower Hamlets, for example, now records the highest overall rate at 46.5%. Families there have higher birth rates, with the lack of extra benefit having no effect. Families from ethnic minority backgrounds are disproportionately affected, with nearly half of children from black and Asian communities living in relative poverty, compared with a quarter of white children. Up and down the country, the extra cash will go where these conditions are found, but the lifestyle is unlikely to change for the better.

There are better alternatives. Early interventions, such as more provision of affordable childcare, encouragement to girls to get as much as education as possible before starting a family, as well as encouraging women to go out to work, would bring long-term benefits for health, education and family stability. Strengthening social services and expanding childcare would address root causes more effectively than lifting the cap, and it would do more to ensure that child poverty is not handed down generation to generation.

Welfare policy is not just about handing out cash without responsibility. There is nothing wrong with suggesting to couples that they should not have more children if they cannot look after them and that they should not expect others to pick up the tab. Ending the cap may ease hardship for some families—provided the cash is spent on children—but it is a divisive, blunt instrument, seeming to be set more to please party activists than the general tax-paying public, who tend to be not in favour.

Covid Counter-Fraud Commissioner

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I completely agree with the noble Lord. The underlying point he is making is that we should be able to understand where taxpayers’ money has gone and to recover as much of that as possible, so that it is not lining the fraudsters’ pockets but is funding our public services. That is absolutely what the commissioner’s work is about: identifying where that money has gone and trying to recover as much of it as possible.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

Does the Minister agree that the root cause of the fraud was our lack of preparedness for the epidemic, which caused people to rush into contracts? What assurance can he give the House that if there is another pandemic—heaven forbid—even this year, we are ready and would not be open to fraud again?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her question. It was certainly one reason; I do not know whether it was the main reason. A pandemic remains the top risk facing the UK, as outlined in the national risk register, and ensuring that the UK is prepared for a future pandemic is a top priority for the Government. We are embedding the lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic within our approach to pandemic preparedness. As I understand it, it is clear that the UK did not have enough PPE, for example, in stock when the pandemic hit, and at the Budget we invested £460 million to strengthen the UK’s pandemic preparedness and health protection capabilities. There is also a forthcoming Department of Health and Social Care pandemic preparedness strategy. It will include a new UK-wide respiratory pandemic response plan, which will be tested later this year in a tier 1 national exercise.

Bank Accounts

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Wednesday 19th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

Well, I can reassure the noble Baroness that that is exactly what the amendment to the Financial Services and Markets Act requires the FCA to do. It should look not just at the appropriateness of the guidance but at firms’ adherence to that guidance. We have asked it to get feedback from those who are affected by this guidance and take particular account of the impact on family members, which is an issue that many noble Lords have raised with me. We expect the FCA to follow that rigorously. The FCA is required to provide an update to this House on the progress of that work within a few months of it starting, and I am sure noble Lords will pay close attention to that.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, I know it is customary for children to blame their parents for everything, but will the Minister extend her concern to credit cards? My daughter, who is a very modest earner and has had the same credit card provider for 20 years, is being investigated in depth, with every piece of financial information needing to be produced, and we can think of no reason other than that I am her mother.

Inheritance Tax: Cohabiting Siblings

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Tuesday 20th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, I was disappointed that the party opposite did not support our changes to pensions, which were key for many public sector workers in respect of recruitment and retention for their posts. The primary purpose of a pension is to provide income or funds that individuals can draw on in retirement. If an individual dies before they get to use it for that purpose, we believe their beneficiaries should be able to have those funds, and that is why unspent pension pots do not normally form part of an individual’s estate. As the Chancellor said to the TSC after the Budget 2023, we will keep any changes to the lifetime and annual allowances under consideration and look at the impact.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, I think the Minister is avoiding the issue of principle. Ever since I took an interest some 15 years ago in the case of the Burden sisters, referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, I have wondered why the financial inheritance benefits of coupling up are confined to sexual relationships, whether it is husband and wife, civil partners or even a deceased person and the person they lived with. What is so special about the sexual relationship, when you might have two sisters who have been committed for much longer, are unable to marry and have undertaken freely to take care of each other? The Government would not even lose in the end, because the inheritance tax is rolled over. Will the Minister please address the issue of principle?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, I do not think that I am not addressing the issue of principle; I am just disagreeing with some noble Lords on the conclusions of that question. The Government’s view is that marriage and civil partnership relationships necessarily entail particular legal and financial obligations to one another for the parties concerned. We think it is right that those obligations are reflected in our inheritance tax system. When it comes to the impact of inheritance tax, however, on people in the circumstances to which the noble Baroness referred, there are several measures in place to ensure that those impacts are minimised. Those include the existence of the nil-rate band, which means that the vast majority of people in this country—fewer than 6% of estates this year are due to fall subject to inheritance tax—do not pay inheritance tax. For those who are affected, there are measures in place to ensure the smoothing of those obligations when they find themselves in circumstances that we have heard about today.

Wealth Inequality

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Wednesday 21st January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, I am, the Government are, and we disagree with the committee.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, does the Minister agree that the poverty gap can never be closed—both in this country and, especially, abroad—until women are freed from subjection, given full education, allowed to work and provided with childcare; until we end warfare in some countries, improve health and make sure that everybody speaks the language of the country in which they live; and until they achieve their full educational potential? These are issues almost greater than this House can tackle.

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, that is a very important point. I pay tribute to the role of the charities in promoting women’s rights, as I said earlier. If we look at countries with very high levels of poverty and civil strife—Pakistan is an obvious example—the proportion of women who are illiterate is still shockingly high.

Children: Childcare Costs

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Thursday 31st January 2013 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Baroness Deech]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have any plans to assist full-time working parents by granting tax relief on childcare costs.

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, the Government announced in the mid-term review that they would support families with childcare costs. They are considering options and will make an announcement shortly. Earlier this week, they published plans to improve high-quality childcare which represents true value for parents, children and the taxpayer.

[Baroness Deech]

The noble Lord will appreciate that improvements in quality do not amount to affordability. We cannot expect, and the Government cannot call on, women to take half the top jobs and half the places in boardrooms without childcare help, because they are squeezed out in mid-career by unaffordability. Childcare for a woman in full-time work is just as worthy of tax relief as secretarial assistance for the businessman, who receives the full allowance on that. The difference in treatment of employees with workplace nurseries and those without is unfair, and it is even worse for the self-employed. Therefore, will the Minister please consider basic-rate tax relief being available for the employed and self-employed alike who wish to work full time?

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, the factors that the noble Baroness has referred to are exactly the kinds of considerations currently being undertaken. Of course, the Government are extremely keen, not just in this area but more generally, to ensure that women can achieve their potential. She will be aware of the steps that my right honourable friend the Secretary of State at BIS is taking to ensure that a higher proportion of women is appointed to boardrooms up and down the country.

Universities: VAT on Alterations to Listed Buildings

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Thursday 5th July 2012 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Baroness Deech]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what evaluation they have made of the impact on universities of the removal of the zero rate of VAT for alterations to protected buildings.

[The Commercial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Sassoon)]

My Lords, removing the zero rate of VAT from alterations to listed buildings, including those belonging to universities, removes a perverse incentive to change rather than repair them and ensures that all alteration works receive the same tax treatment. The change makes the VAT rules simpler for businesses to understand and reduces the scope for error and non-compliance. In the Government’s assessment of the impact of the measure included in the consultation response published on 28 June, no separate assessment was made of the impact on particular categories of listed building.

[Baroness Deech]

Does the Minister fully appreciate that the proposed removal of zero-rated VAT for much needed university alterations to listed buildings will have a severe impact on those universities? Not just Oxbridge, but nearly every university old and new has listed buildings and the sector as a whole will have to find an additional £150 million over the next five years. It is like an extra tax which will reduce the amount that universities have for bursaries. Will the Minister accept that the situation could be rescued without a U-turn if the Government were to limit zero-rating to buildings owned and occupied by charities?

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I fully accept that universities will be affected, but that is not a reason not to go ahead with this measure. It is for sound and principled reasons, which I have summarised. There has been an extensive consultation process, including my honourable friend the Exchequer Secretary meeting representatives from a number of Oxbridge colleges, including the noble Baroness’s successor as principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford. There have been various numbers, including numbers coming from Oxford, which seem to vary considerably, meeting by meeting. I do not therefore recognise the £150 million figure, but I accept that there is a cost. As a result of the consultation, there have been significant changes to extend the transitional period and some of the details of the transition, but the change will go ahead.

Taxation: Plastic Bags

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Monday 28th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I agree with my noble friend that progress has been made. We would like to see more progress, of course, but all that has been done without a minimum charge or any form of taxation. The Government encourage all these initiatives.

[Baroness Deech]

Will the Minister extend his concern to the equally wasteful and annoying practice of sending out parliamentary mail in plastic bags that are very difficult to open, not to mention the plastic bags you have to use for little bottles of liquid when going through airport security? However, the mail coming from Parliament is especially wasteful of plastic.

[Lord Sassoon]

My Lords, I am sure that the authorities of the House have listened carefully to that bit of advice.