Queen’s Speech

Baroness Noakes Excerpts

Wednesday 16th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Noakes]

My Lords, it is a bit rich that the party opposite has tabled its amendment to the Motion for an humble Address. It seems to have collective amnesia about the economic mess that it left this country in only two years ago. Let me remind it that it left behind a very large deficit. There is no doubt that some of the ballooning of the deficit was down to the financial crisis, but the Labour Government had been consistently spending beyond their means in the run-up to that crisis. They failed to reform welfare spending and failed to deliver efficiency in the delivery of public services. They had overcommitted the defence budget by £38 billion. They left behind a legacy of debt and forecasts of more deficits to come, but they also left no credible plans to reduce them. That was not just our opinion; that is what the IMF and the OECD told us.

Since my Government came to power, we have delivered firm action to control public expenditure and to eliminate the structural deficit. We have balanced the defence budget. Debt will be falling as a percentage of national income by the end of 2015-16. It is through that resolve that we have reduced the cost of borrowing and kept it low. Yesterday, gilt yields were at their lowest for 300 years.

The noble Lord, Lord Myners, who is no longer in his place, is wrong about interest rates. They are a reflection of market confidence, as anyone can find out by looking at what is happening to eurozone interest rates. I hope that, when he winds up this evening, the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, will tell the House what he thinks interest rates would have been today if his party had continued to manage the economy.

I pay tribute to my right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer for delivering this impressive result. The economic headwinds have not been favourable in the past two years. He could have lost his nerve and taken the advice of the party opposite to spend our way out of trouble. However, Labour has never explained the magic by which spending more will not result in unsustainably high levels of debt and rising interest rates. Perhaps the noble Lord will do so today.

Our economic policies are often given the label of “austerity” but we are not in the same league as Greece. Our public expenditure will continue to rise. At the same time, we are taking 2 million people on the lowest incomes out of taxation altogether. We are managing to escape from the millstone of a 50p tax rate and reducing corporation tax rates to more competitive levels to support our economy.

There is no doubt that the economic outlook continues to be troubling. The uncertainty created by eurozone instability is a big problem. I can see no future for Greece remaining in the euro and the best thing for it would be to exit, or “Grexit” as Willem Buiter would have us say. Other eurozone countries are also struggling. Spain and Italy are again having a bad week in the bond and credit markets. We need the eurozone to sort itself out, which is why I support the Bill, which has already been introduced, to endorse the eurozone stability mechanism. However, there is not much else that the Government can or should do to support the eurozone. We should certainly not put our cash into any eurozone rescue fund.

The Government can do things to support growth in our economy and have done a lot already. However, there is more to be done and I would have liked to see more in the gracious Speech to support UK businesses. In particular, I would have liked to see a commitment to reverse more of the regulatory burdens and employee rights imposed by the previous Government. These are the very things that make running businesses, especially at the small and medium-sized end of the spectrum, particularly tough.

There are some parts of the legislative plans in the gracious Speech about which I am not entirely enthusiastic. We are promised legislation to reform competition law to promote enterprise and fair markets, which sounds good in theory. However, competition law has often ended up being a big stick with which to beat our most successful businesses. A wholly blame-free company can end up with a lot of costs and huge distractions from running its business if the OFT launches an unnecessary investigation. Let us see whether the Bill really promotes enterprise.

In the same Bill we are promised the green investment bank, about which some noble Lords seem enthusiastic. It is not a bank in any real sense. It will put money into things that sensible banks would not touch with a barge pole. It will be gambling with taxpayers’ money. Even the cheerleading report on the green investment bank commissioned by BIS goes no further than to say that,

“it is unlikely to have a significant impact on economic growth … in the short term, but there might be some benefits in the long term”.

We are paying homage to the green religion at just the time that other countries are seeing that green policies are expensive luxuries. We do not have any spare money for such luxuries. We could spend the £3 billion that has been committed to it on so many more things that would promote our economic growth.

We are also promised a Bill on the reform of the electricity industry. But, in plain English, that means more subsidies for green energy, which in turn means more costs for British businesses and domestic consumers. I hope that the Government will start to understand that the cost of energy in this country is a very real burden. They need to find ways of reducing it and not increasing it. This is another unaffordable green luxury. Last year, my right honourable friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer got it right when he said that he would not save the planet by putting our country out of business. When these Bills come forward, they must be justified against that background.

Finally, I turn to the promises of legislation on the financial services sector. There will be two Bills; namely, the Financial Services Bill, which was carried over from the previous Session, and the banking legislation. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Myners, on the need to look carefully at the powers of the governor. However, there is one thing that is not likely to be covered in either Bill, which I hope that the Government will want to address. The Bank of England has resisted calls to publish an assessment of its role in the financial crisis. I do not understand how we can be expected to consider legislation explicitly designed to remedy deficiencies that arose during the financial crisis without that background. How will we know whether the problems related to the crisis have been dealt with? I hope that my noble friend the Minister will have an answer to this problem before he brings the Bills before your Lordships’ House.