Economic Forecasts

Lord Lawson of Blaby Excerpts

Tuesday 17th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lawson of Blaby (Con)]

Will my noble friend ignore the misery mongers on the Opposition Benches? Is she aware that some time back, long before the beneficent Brexit decision, the majority of economists, including the Bank of England, were saying that sterling was overvalued and needed to come down, and that inflation was too low—far below the 2% target—and needed to go up? When these things are gradually happening, they then say it is a disaster. Would she like to comment on that?

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe]

I very much agree with my noble friend that we always need to look at the opportunities. As I have often said, I am glass half full, not glass half empty. Like the Prime Minister, I am determined that we should pursue a good Brexit and a bold and ambitious free trade agreement with the European Union, if I may pick up the comments that were made in relation to Mr Ricardo.

Economy: Overseas Trade Deficit

Lord Lawson of Blaby Excerpts

Wednesday 25th May 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord O'Neill of Gatley]

My Lords, I thought that I had read the Financial Times thoroughly this morning but I missed that particular piece. If we want to reduce our current account deficit by reducing our attractiveness to foreign investment, we need to be very careful on 23 June.

[Lord Lawson of Blaby (Con)]

My Lords—

[Lord Kinnock (Lab)]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord O'Neill of Gatley]

My Lords, I hate to be a statistical nerd about these things, but I am staring at the data. Last year, our overall trade balance as a share of GDP was minus 0.20%. In 2010, it was minus 2.8%. As I said a few minutes ago, the trade deficit today is smaller than it has been for 10 years.

[Lord Lawson of Blaby]

My Lords, in the context of inward investment, to which my noble friend rightly referred and which is in fact the driver of this, did he have time in his busy life to read the story in Le Monde a few days ago? It was reported that the important French internet company Valtech is waiting for the outcome of the referendum and, in the event of Brexit, proposes to move its headquarters from Luxembourg to London.

[Lord O'Neill of Gatley]

My Lords, I like to think that my talents are spreading as the years go by but I am not yet capable of reading a French newspaper and so have not read that particular story.

Greece

Lord Lawson of Blaby Excerpts

Monday 6th July 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lawson of Blaby (Con)]

My Lords, we are fortunate in this House in having a Treasury Minister of exceptional financial expertise and understanding. He will be well aware that Greece should never have entered the eurozone in the first place. He will also be well aware that there is no solution to the Greek problem without a substantial write-off of Greek debt—what the noble Lord, Lord Davies, referred to somewhat euphemistically as a “restructuring”. Is the Minister not also aware that there will be no solution to the Greek crisis without Greece leaving the eurozone altogether? That is necessary for Greece and for the eurozone. It is important that this exit should be conducted in as orderly a way as possible.

Wealth Inequality

Lord Lawson of Blaby Excerpts

Wednesday 21st January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, it is simply not true: income inequality has not risen under this Administration. The £1,600 figure—which was immensely dubious even when it was first used three years ago—is now completely outdated by the fact that wages are rising in real terms. The key thing in terms of prosperity and, indeed, income distribution is to increase the number of jobs, to increase the number of well paid jobs. We have increased the number of jobs and vastly increased the number of apprentices. That is the how we are going to enable people from the bottom end of the income scale to do better in the future.

[Lord Lawson of Blaby (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend the Minister referred to the forthcoming Private Member’s Bill to enshrine the 0.7% ODA figure in law. Is he aware that the Economic Affairs Committee of this House produced a unanimous report a short while ago pointing out very clearly and cogently why that would be wholly wrong?

[Lord Newby]

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

Autumn Statement

Lord Lawson of Blaby Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lawson of Blaby (Con)]

My Lords, I shall begin by saying that I agree very strongly with my noble friend Lord Wrigglesworth. In no way does it make sense to continue with ring-fencing in the next Parliament. All public expenditure has to be judged on its merits, whichever department happens to be responsible for it.

In the short time we have, I do not want to talk about the particular measures in the Autumn Statement—I will discuss wider issues—save to say one thing. I know that my right honourable friend George Osborne is very anxious to go down as a tax-reforming Chancellor. This year, he has lived up to that with the reform of the annuities system in the spring Budget and the reform of the stamp duty system in this autumn budget—because that is what it is. Both of them are substantial and, in my view, welcome reforms.

On the wider issues, nothing is perfect in this wicked world, but by any reasonable standards the British economy is a success story. It is a success story despite, I have to say, the difficulties of conducting economic policy in coalition with my noble friends the Liberal Democrats. It has made the task immensely harder and I hope that this will not continue and we will be able to conduct policy untrammelled by this complication; it is difficult enough without them. It has also been a success story despite the public deficit having been halved. It is still too big but it has been halved, which puts into perspective the views of the naive Keynesians, some of whom are in our midst. I welcome in particular the consensus we now have between the two major parties that it is important to continue to bear down on the deficit. The two parties may have different ideas about how this should be done, but there is a consensus that it needs to be done.

One of the signs and proofs of the success of the British economy is to be seen across the Channel. The difference between the British economy and the economies of the rest of Europe is striking. There are two main reasons for this. One is that we are not members of the eurozone, which is a disaster. I regret that because I do not wish our neighbours to be suffering under the regime, but there it is. The other reason, which is probably more important, is that the massive range of supply side reforms brought in by the Conservative Governments of the 1980s have made the British economy far more flexible than any other economy of Europe. Fortunately, most of those supply side reforms have stuck. They have endured because even the Labour Party can see that they were successful in the 1980s and have remained a great strength for this country.

Looking ahead, much has been said about the warning lights flashing about the world economy. The world economy is tremendously important to a major trading nation such as ours, but it is very much a mixed picture. There is both bad and good. On the bad side, there is the eurozone, which I mentioned a moment ago, and also the problem of Japan going back into recession despite a massive Keynesian boost. The good is that the emerging world is still powering ahead. Obviously, no one would expect China to continue at the huge rate of growth it was achieving, but it is still growing and so is much of the emerging world. The other thing is the reduction in the oil price, which is hugely beneficial.

What do we need to do to continue with our success? There are two areas of importance. I have not got much time so I will mention one just briefly. We have to do far more to clean up the British banking system, which is so important to us as a great world financial centre and to the rest of British industry. The other thing is that we have to radically change our energy policy. We have an absurd energy policy, predicated confidently by DECC and its Secretary of State on an inexorably rising oil and gas price. In fact, the price has fallen and since the things that made it fall continue to exist, it is likely to continue to be weak. We have moved from a market-driven energy policy to one of state control of everything—and largely unaccountable state control. It is damaging for British industry, damaging for the poor and it is deterring investment in electricity and energy generally. We have to move back to a market policy for energy.

[Lord Hunt of Chesterton (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Lawson of Blaby]

I do not have time to yield to interventions. That is the nature of a debate in which we are limited to five minutes each. We cannot accept interventions. But my time is already over so I will end by saying that I warmly commend my successor-but-five, George Osborne, on his Autumn Statement yesterday and on his stewardship of the economy over the past few years.

Income Tax

Lord Lawson of Blaby Excerpts

Wednesday 19th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, the Government have absolutely no plans to increase VAT.

[Lord Lawson of Blaby (Con)]

My Lords, is it not a bit cheeky for the noble Lord, who is the eminence grise of the party opposite, to talk about recklessness, when his party’s policy is to increase the deficit even more?

Finance Bill

Lord Lawson of Blaby Excerpts

Wednesday 16th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lawson of Blaby (Con)]

My Lords, this is a relatively brief but remarkably wide-ranging debate. The most important thing, however, in my judgment, is to pay tribute to my noble friend Lord MacGregor, because this is something of a valedictory occasion. He described himself as the retiring chairman of the Economic Affairs Committee of your Lordships’ House. While his manner is always attractively modest, I have never considered him to be particularly retiring, but he is certainly retired, and his loss will be greatly felt. I have worked with him one way or another for quite a long time. We began working together when we were both what I believe is now known as special advisers to the then Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, 50 years ago. Off and on we have worked together ever since. He was a brilliant assistant and help to me—and more than that—when he was Chief Secretary to the Treasury during my time as Chancellor of the Exchequer. I hope that I served him equally well as a member of the committee under his chairmanship. I certainly enjoyed it; he will be a very hard act to follow. Nobody could possibly better combine a grasp of practical economics with the art of chairmanship of a committee of a very diverse kind, none of whose members was particularly retiring.

My noble friend the Minister began by saying a little about the state of the economy and how it was in pretty good shape. I absolutely agree with him, and I have no wish to add much to that. Of course, not everything is perfect. I am sure that the noble Lord who will respond from the opposition Bench will point that out, but I shall pre-empt that by saying that I have a secret to tell him. In this world, nothing is ever perfect. But the fact is that the state of the economy in this country is not merely pretty good in the way that my noble friend described; it is good relatively. It is the best performing economy in the G7, comparing particularly well with the economies of the eurozone.

One other thing that my noble friend the Minister could have said but did not is that in sticking to his guns, my successor George Osborne—goodness knows how many there have been in between—has proved to be right when pretty well everybody else was wrong outside those who supported the Government in the first instance. The Opposition predicted that these policies would prove to be completely wrong and would doom the country to an ever deeper recession, but they have been proved completely wrong. So has the IMF, which reminds me of the 364 economists who wrote that letter to the Times in 1981, saying that if we pursued the policies that we were pursuing—very similar to the policies that the present Government have pursued—we would commit this country to a self-perpetuating downward spiral. From the moment they said it, the economy recovered and went on recovering. It was exactly the same with the IMF; when it eventually said, “We no longer have confidence in you and you must change your policies”, from that moment the recovery became unequivocal. Of course, some academic economists supported the Government, but the majority did not—particularly the clever-clever ones, like Professor Paul Krugman of the United States, who is always wrong about everything. It makes him a rather useful man to follow, because you know what to believe. He, too, said that if the policy was pursued any further the recession would never end.

So what do we need to do now that the Chancellor has been vindicated? What threats face the economy? I refer to the threats within our own control. There are always threats that are not in our control, because we are exposed to the world economy. If things go wrong in the eurozone, which they usually do, or in China or the United States, it is bound to have a considerable effect on us.

There are three things in our own control, which I should like to mention. The first is the danger of allowing interest rates to remain at this crisis level of 0.5%—that is the official rate—for too long. Linked with that is the equally artificial crisis measure of quantitative easing, or “underfunding”, as it was known in my day. As many in your Lordships’ House are aware, I have always favoured an independent central bank. I think it is vital that monetary policy should be its province. That does not mean that noble Lords cannot comment on it. I believe it is of the first importance that we move away from the artificially low level of interest rates, and the sooner the better. We should also begin to unwind quantitative easing and change underfunding to overfunding, to use the old-fashioned expression.

I wish the present Governor of the Bank of England well, as we all must. He is relatively new. He got himself into a jam in the first place with the fiasco of his forward guidance which he has had to abandon. He has still been talking about what is going to happen next—perhaps more than he should.

The extremely able Labour Member of Parliament, Pat McFadden, who sits on the House of Commons Treasury Committee, told the governor that he was behaving rather like an unreliable boyfriend, blowing hot and cold. This was rather too close to the mark for comfort. He has given the impression of floundering, which is very dangerous. He does not need to talk about the future level of interest rates. When there is a change, then he needs to explain why it has happened, but he did not need to talk in the way that he did. The Governor of the Bank of England should not appear to be floundering; he should convey authority. It is particularly important in the context of the financial markets, which are very sensitive to this sort of thing.

The second problem, which is to some extent within our control, is the level of bank lending. We still have a situation in which thoroughly sound SMEs have difficulty getting adequate borrowing from the banks on which they rely. Big companies do not rely on the banks; they have no problem in accessing the capital markets directly. Small and medium-sized enterprises are reliant on the banks and it is very difficult for even the soundest of small businesses to get adequate finance at a reasonable rate of interest.

More attention needs to be paid to the recommendations of the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards. A number are relevant to this, though it is too late for me to go into them. I had the honour of serving on that commission. We need to see all those recommendations in force, including particularly ones that the Government have accepted in principle. Some of them are implemented in the banking Act which my noble friend dealt with so well in this House. Others are not in that Act because the Government said that it was not necessary to legislate since the regulatory authorities already had the power. We want to see these things being done. We want the separation between high street, as it used to be called, and investment banking rigorously enforced. Almost every month some new scandal emerges in the banking sector. It is always on the investment banking side and it is detracting from the need for the high street banks to finance SMEs. That is their job and their function.

In this area of bad behaviour we need also to stress the importance of individual responsibility. This is very strongly pointed up in the various reports from the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards. It is no good just fining banks. In my experience, that does not have a big effect on banking behaviour. There is no such thing as a bank being responsible for bad behaviour; it is always individuals who are responsible. Individual responsibility needs to be nailed down. Okay, penalise the banks as well, but it is important that the individuals responsible are punished. If they say, as they have in the past, “We didn’t know about it”, that is no excuse. It is their job to know what is going on in their institutions.

The structure of remuneration needs to be addressed. It is fundamental and again has not yet been done by the banks. It is the job of the PRA to ensure it is. It is also the job of the PRA and the Bank of England to introduce the requirement for banks to have a second set of accounts, which I hope they will accept. IFRS is of dubious correctness for companies generally, but it is clearly inadequate for banks. What we recommend, the Government have accepted and it is now for the PRA and the Bank of England to implement is that there should be a second set of accounts that meets regulatory needs and purposes.

The third threat that faces us is a misguided energy policy. Business and industry in this country, and indeed households, are forced to pay quite excessive energy costs as a result of the energy policy we have in place. It is accepted that that is done in the name of combating climate change. However, even Dieter Helm, the leading energy economist in this country and who accepts fully the alarmist interpretation of climate change, which I believe to be mistaken, is a bitter critic of the energy policies we have in place. His latest writing on this, which I commend to the House, is called The Return of the CEGB, which states that we are going back to a complete étatist energy policy—in fact, a rather worse one than we had under the Labour Governments of the 1970s. He also points out that it will be touch and go this coming winter whether the capacity margin will be adequate, but by the following winter it is almost certain the lights will go out because the capacity margin will come to zero or below.

It is very important that there is a change in our energy policy in the short term, but also in the medium term. Government talks the right talk about developing our indigenous supplies of shale gas, which will be a great help to the British economy in the medium term—although obviously not in the short term—but it is just talk. The most recent report of the Economic Affairs Committee, which as I say is so brilliantly chaired by my noble friend Lord MacGregor, was on this very subject. We pointed out that the regulatory regime is in a mess in this country and inhibits the development of shale. That is not because it is too strict—we need a strict regulatory regime—but because it is too cumbersome, involves too many departments that do not co-ordinate and too many agencies. It takes far too long. We produced a unanimous report.

We have now had a reply from DECC, which is the most complacent reply I have ever seen from any government department, and that is saying something. It says that everything is all right and that none of our recommendations is necessary. The department seems not to be aware of the evidence, including the fact that even now not a single exploratory well has been drilled. We had evidence from Cuadrilla, the most prominent of the companies operating, that, even if there is no judicial review of planning, it takes three years from first preparing the environmental impact assessment to being able to drill. That is ludicrous compared with what has happened so successfully in the United States. The response completely ignores the evidence that we had from Chris Wright, the father of shale gas in the United States and a great Anglophile. He said that he would love to invest in this country but, on the present basis, there is no way that it would make sense for him to do that.

I say to the Minister that there is one easy thing that he could do straightaway. The present Government have Cabinet committees on a whole range of trivial matters—one would find it hard to believe—but there is no Cabinet committee on something as important as the extraction of our shale resources. Because of all the departments and agencies involved—the Environment Agency and lots of others—it is absolutely essential to have a Cabinet committee to bring everything together, and we recommended that such a committee should be chaired by the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

I have one final point to make on the report of the Economic Affairs Committee. In 2012—again, under the excellent chairmanship of my noble friend—we produced a report on the economics of development aid. Again, there was unanimous, all-party agreement that the antiquated 1970 aid target of 0.7% of GNP made no sense. Above all, this should never be made statutorily binding. It is palpably absurd to make any public expenditure statutorily binding, and there are no such pretensions with things such as national health spending. I do not think that the public would see any sense in that at all, and we made that absolutely clear.

We are now told that there is going to be a Private Member’s Bill—from the Liberal Democrats, I understand —starting in the other House but reaching us during this Parliament, to make the 0.7% target statutorily binding. If it ever reaches this House—it may not—I hope that we will examine it with exemplary thoroughness and not take too little time over a Bill which is clearly a major nonsense and for which, if it were to be passed, future generations would curse us.

Income Tax: Top Rate

Lord Lawson of Blaby Excerpts

Tuesday 15th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, there is no £3 billion, as I have explained. The effect of the cut is £110 million. The other measures we have taken will bring in over a three-year period some £7 billion extra from the same people. For people on ordinary incomes, the rise in the income tax threshold means that by next year the typical basic rate taxpayer will be £805 per annum better off and 3.2 million people who were otherwise paying income tax will not be paying income tax at all.

[Lord Lawson of Blaby (Con)]

My Lords, it may be difficult for the party opposite and my noble friends on the Liberal Democrat Benches to understand, but taxation has one purpose, and one purpose only, which is to raise revenue. The Minister said his memory is not very good, so may I remind him that when in 1988 I reduced the top rate of income tax from 60% to 40%, it brought in much more revenue and also resulted in the wealthy paying a higher proportion of tax than ever before? Will he reconsider his previous answer?

[Lord Newby]

No, my Lords, it simply is not true that the sole purpose of tax is to bring in revenue. Obviously every tax does bring in revenue, but some tax is introduced in order to affect behaviour. We are about to have a plastic bag tax but I do not think that the primary purpose of that tax is to bring in money.

Tax: Aggressive Tax Avoidance

Lord Lawson of Blaby Excerpts

Wednesday 9th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, at the start of this Parliament, we established the Office of Tax Simplification. It has done useful work in reducing the body of tax law, although clearly it has a long way to go. On the work that has been going on to tackle tax avoidance schemes, I think that the tax avoidance industry has got the message; the number of potential avoidance schemes notified to HMRC fell by 75% in the two years from 2010.

[Lord Lawson of Blaby (Con)]

My Lords, my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay is absolutely right, as is the noble Lord, Lord Rooker—the two things go together. When I was Chancellor some years back, I reduced tax rates substantially, eliminated a whole range of allowances and indeed abolished some stupid taxes altogether, and the result was a great increase in revenue. However, is there not another point? If, after you have done that—which I commend to the Government—there is still a real problem with avoidance of a particular tax. Is there not a case for abolishing that tax and replacing it with another one that is less easy to avoid?

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, I think that that is easier said than done.

Economy: House Prices

Lord Lawson of Blaby Excerpts

Thursday 3rd July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Newby]

My Lords, I remind the noble Lord that in Q1 2009 there were 17,000 housing starts and in Q1 2014 there were 36,000. There has been a major crash in the housebuilding sector. This is now being corrected with housing starts and planning permissions being significantly greater—typically around 30% more—than a year ago. I also remind the noble Lord that while we have had a rapidly rising population in the UK, for decades housing starts have been 200,000 fewer than in France, for example, where the population has not been rising in the same way. There is a chronic problem in housing. We are beginning to tackle it by programmes that support people buying their own home, liberalising planning and providing support for small to medium-sized housebuilders. This is not going to be an easy fix for a Government of any colour.

[Lord Lawson of Blaby (Con)]

My Lords, while it is certainly very desirable that more houses are built in this country, does my noble friend not agree that the real problem is still the unmet need to streamline and speed up the planning process? Would it not be a good idea if all sides of the House would put pressure on this?