King’s Speech

Lord Kempsell Excerpts

Thursday 14th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

My Lords, I listened with great interest to the many excellent speeches in this debate and I commend, in particular, my noble friends Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Lord Moynihan of Chelsea for their outstanding contributions.

However, it is to another speech that I return, because I have been turning it over in my mind: the speech on 5 July 2024 that the Prime Minister gave when he stood on Downing Street and delivered his first statement in office. If noble Lords cannot recall it word for word, I do not blame them—the reset button has been hit many times since then. In that first address as Prime Minister to the British people, the current resident of 10 Downing Street—or at least he was when I checked a few moments ago—set out his agenda for the country. When I reread those words, it dawned on me that he made barely any mention of the economy. Given how the Government have performed over the 678 days since, that oversight now makes perfect sense.

Under Labour, the British economy is like a mirror reflecting the worst instincts of the Prime Minister: it is slow to move, overly biased towards an outdated rulebook and now dangerously close to implosion. As noble Lords have reminded us throughout this debate, since 2024, growth has been relentlessly flat, and the IMF has now downgraded the UK’s growth forecast to 0.8%, which is the largest downgrade in the G7—and all this despite the Government claiming that growth would be its watchword and its number one priority. The Prime Minister himself once famously said, “Growth is the answer”, but under this Government it has become only an ever more pressing question.

Hard-working people across the country today see Westminster at its worst. The civil war consuming the Labour Party is more than a story in this postcode district. Outside these confines, Labour chaos is causing real damage to what was already a struggling and fragile economy. Among 6 am Britain—the strivers and risk-takers who build businesses, create jobs and strive for a better life for themselves and their families—they hoped for answers from the gracious Speech, but, again, it has transpired that the Government have nothing to say to them.

The situation is at breaking point for my own generation. Under this Government, unemployment has increased and the OBR says that it will get worse. For young people, the unemployment rate is now a scandalous 15.8%, up 2.4% since Labour came to office. My contribution to this debate is on behalf of the 1 million young people not in work, education or training, a statistic now worse than that of Spain or Greece—the economies that we used to point to as the international high watermark of youth unemployment. The crippling rise in employers’ NICs stole their entry-level jobs. The very opportunity that noble Ministers refer to as one that this Government have tried to create is in fact being crushed by them. That means no first job on the high street to get your working life off the ground, no casual work to fit around your studies and too few high-quality apprenticeships—for example, for families who simply cannot afford university education.

The ITEM Club forecasts that the labour market will weaken significantly this year, and the British Chambers of Commerce finds that 41% of businesses are worried about business rates, up 7% on last year. It is no surprise to me at all that business investment is down, decreasing by 2.5% in the last quarter of 2025.

As we know, on the macro side, borrowing costs are surging: this Government are paying £305 million a day just to service the cost of debt interest. This week, gilts hit an 18-year high thanks to No. 10’s instability, higher than in any other G7 country—all this from the party that told the electorate that

“the grown-ups are back in charge”.

When he was elected, they called the Prime Minister “Mr Rules”, but as he reaches the end of his time in office, we can say only that he is “Mr Chaos”. What is the answer presented by the Government in the gracious Speech? What is the plan set out today? It is to waste endless hours of parliamentary time in this forthcoming Session on unwanted EU integration, turning away from the dynamic and high-growth partner economies that are traditionally strengthened by their trade with the UK and back to the outmoded plans of the past.

I urge Ministers to intercede with their colleagues in the other place and ask them to bring an end to the chaos and instability that we see today, to put jobs and prosperity first, to get the economy motoring and to let growth flower. If they do not, we can conclude only that the economic legacy of this Government will be the same as of every other Labour Administration in history: higher taxes, higher borrowing, higher unemployment and lower growth. Will it be the case that in the desk drawer in No. 11 there will be another note left behind saying, “I’m sorry, there is no money left”? If that is the case, we will be able to conclude only that, once more, Labour has done it again.

Online Communication Offence Arrests

Lord Kempsell Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

I declare my interest as a freelance journalist and publisher and, therefore, as somebody who makes his living from freedom of speech. I join noble Lords in thanking the noble Lord, Lord Lebedev, for securing today’s timely and important debate. As I find myself the last Back-Bencher on the speakers’ list, perhaps I might venture to sum up the situation.

Anybody listening to the debate in this Committee today will have concluded that, in 2025, the United Kingdom is in a state of free speech emergency. As we have heard, the police are now making more than 30 arrests a day for online offensive messages—an increase of 121% from 2017. As the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, adumbrated so well, every police force in this country has a dedicated team monitoring social media. My noble friend Lord Frost’s point deserves further weight, to emphasise that, in the modern online world, communication has changed. It is the internet of 2025 that authorities are observing, with memes and rapid forms of communication, when the legislative framework feels as though it was built for the internet of 20 years ago.

I turn to another topic that we are yet to cover in the debate, which is the free speech of parliamentarians. I am now not the only media publisher or journalist in your Lordships’ House; in fact, our number is ever increasing. However, as a publisher, I found myself in January served with the super-injunction—now lifted—that precluded and prevented the reporting of the scandal of the Afghan response route being exposed. I was served with that super-injunction in my capacity as a journalist and reporter. I had no knowledge of the scheme or the policy while in government, but it of course prevented me reporting the facts of this enormous debacle, which is of huge public concern.

Could I have made those points in your Lordships’ House? Well, I took advice, and there are limits to parliamentary privilege in both the other place and your Lordships’ House. There are a large number of Ministers and parliamentarians who were also effectively gagged from exposing the truth of this scandal to the public, even in Parliament. In a rare note of congratulation, I note that the Government have, in my view, done completely the right thing in supporting the lifting of this super-injunction. It gives me some regret—and, I am afraid to say, shame—that my own party, the Conservative Party, instituted this super-injunction and supported it while in government. I note, though, that the current Labour Government chose to extend its application until recently.

As I said, there are limits to parliamentary privilege, but there was also a moral dichotomy in this case. Those who were served with the super-injunction were told that breaking it would constitute an immediate and real threat to life but, lo and behold, we now learn from the Government’s own recent review that the basis for that assumption may well have been faulty. That review has cast considerable doubt on the notion that those whose data was subject to the leak were in fact at imminent and real risk. The reviewer wrote:

“There is little evidence of intent by the Taliban to conduct a campaign of retribution against”


former officials. Indeed,

“the wealth of data inherited”

by the Taliban would have already enabled that, notwithstanding the leak of the spreadsheet. That claim has also been repeated by the Talban themselves.

Why was it, then, that parliamentarians were even gagged, let alone the media prevented from reporting this outrageous scandal of high and real public interest? As a parliamentarian, I find it deeply troubling that that was the case. I urge the Government, in their response to the wash-up of these issues, to adumbrate what they will do to ensure that the privilege of parliamentarians is protected and that never again can a scandal on this scale be concealed from the public.

Inheritance Tax, National Insurance and VAT

Lord Kempsell Excerpts

Monday 27th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Morrow, for securing this important and timely debate. Given the time constraints, I intend to confine my comments to the impact of VAT on independent schools in the nations and regions.

I suppose I could not do any better than to associate myself with the noble Lord’s introduction to this Question for Short Debate, because he adumbrated so brilliantly the unintended consequences that Ministers have unleashed with this nonsensical and ill-formed policy. I think that the Government thought they were targeting a certain class demographic and a certain income demographic with their decision to impose VAT on independent school fees, but in fact they have unleashed a mess of unintended consequences across the country.

One that I have been focusing on is the impact of this decision on Armed Forces families, who have been particularly badly hit. Many of them have to send their children to boarding schools so that they are available to be active on operations. They are, of course, based across the whole of the United Kingdom and abroad. I thank Ministers for their concessions on that issue at the Budget, although there is more to be done.

Let me focus the attention of your Lordships’ House on just where this impact is being felt most. It is across the nations and regions, because there have been school closures in the south-east, the West Midlands, the east of England, Scotland—all over the country. The disproportionate degree of closures of independent schools that we see in rural and semi-rural areas is another example of the ill-thought-out consequences of this policy. When the Minister sums up, will he assess that and allow us to have an understanding of the Government’s thoughts on the disproportionate impact across the nations and regions of the decision to impose VAT on independent school fees?

Public Sector Productivity

Lord Kempsell Excerpts

Wednesday 9th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kempsell (Con)]

My Lords, I join in the thanks expressed to my noble friend Lady Neville-Rolfe for securing this important and timely debate, especially before the Budget. I will also, in the spirit expressed by the noble Lord, Lord Londesborough, keep my remarks productive, efficient and brief, even as a humble life Peer.

A significant essay was circulated recently online among the policy nerd community. It was entitled Foundations: Why Britain Has Stagnated. The piece was co-authored by Sam Bowman, Ben Southwood and Samuel Hughes. The essay highlights the difficulties that the UK is experiencing with productivity in general— a significant component of which is, of course, our sluggish public sector productivity. The authors note that, according to OECD figures, productivity growth between 2019 and 2023 was 7.6% in the United States and just 1.5% in Britain. They go on to explain:

“This is not a general Western European problem: the French and Germans are 15 percent and 18 percent more productive than us respectively”.


Of course, that is productivity across the whole economy. The point about infrastructure investment, capital investment and public investment was made by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson.

Although the essay highlights the litany of infrastructure failures and lack of capital investment, we must also acknowledge the particular productivity issues which we all know are specific to the culture in the public sector. For example, I was recently amazed to discover that, while the private sector and business do everything they can to embrace the AI revolution, a recent National Audit Office study found that just 37% of government bodies had deployed any artificial intelligence at all. Across the entire scope of government, it had identified in its study just 74 individual AI use cases.

I remember being similarly horrified to discover a few years ago when I was a special adviser trying to tackle a failing programme in the Department for Work and Pensions that an entire satellite office was employed outside London just to process paperwork manually, with the most basic online solutions and digital efficiencies not yet deployed. We should be unashamed to call this out for what it is: the UK public sector is behind the curve. There is a cultural issue that is preventing the public sector using the tools or deploying the technology and structures that underpin productivity. Those points were ably made by my noble friends Lord Patten, Lord Hannan and Lord Elliott.

It is no surprise that public sector productivity is failing to return to pre-pandemic levels. Since we are in the realm of suggesting ideas to the Minister, might I touch on a piece of work that I tried to set in train in government, focusing particularly on gathering better and more scientifically based evidence for productivity and more scientific evaluation of government programmes? Unless we have the evidence, we will not be able to judge productivity improvement successfully. In establishing the Evaluation Task Force, I put together a team across the Cabinet Office and the Treasury to keep that eye on public sector productivity and to ask whether government interventions are bringing about the outcomes that they are intended to achieve and how we know. Do we have the evidence to confidently say that effort and public expenditure are productive?

We cannot get to the roots of our public sector productivity problem without good data and that significant store of evidence. I therefore urge Ministers, as they are rightly keen to drive public sector productivity, to take that radical approach, starting with so many lessons heard in the debate this evening.