Public Services: Economic and Climatic Challenges

Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kirkwood of Kirkhope (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow my good friend the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, who made a very powerful speech. He has convinced me of most of his ideas just by bullying me incessantly on every occasion we meet, but he has not yet convinced me about identity cards. However, the debate can continue. I am also grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who is a wise parliamentarian. I have followed his career and, if he thinks that this is an important subject, that is good enough for me. His experience in government puts him in a very good position to take an overview and we owe him a debt for the way he introduced his debate. I confess that I share his sense of frustration and urgency and I hope that this debate will start bringing some much needed focus to this very important subject.

To lighten his reading load a little, I suggest something for him apart from reading his erudite philosopher. I picked up a very interesting book by an American professor, Tim Morton, entitled Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. It is about ignoring knowns, and he makes a very important point. He describes “hyperobjects”, some of which the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, certainly identified. I have not finished it yet, so I do not know if there is a happy ending, but I would recommend it to colleagues for reading in future.

I suddenly became interested in the subject in autumn last year, when the Grangemouth Ineos dispute took place. Noble Lords will remember that it was a pretty tense moment north of the border. There was a lot of trade union and party-political infighting, and it had a resolution that was, thankfully, reasonably sensible. I was astonished to find that one company was in control of 85% of the petrol distribution in Scotland, a private company with some quite headstrong, controversial directors, who were making personal decisions. I think that it was all part of the war game. I am not completely naive; I think that there was quite a lot of tic-tac going on in the press to gain advantage in the dispute with the trade union. Some 800 jobs were at risk, and that is a very serious blow. But I was completely surprised to learn that North Sea oil could effectively be closed down for swathes of the northern part of the United Kingdom, simply because of the local difficulties of an individual commercial company.

It made me think that we need to think more carefully and deeply about how fast society is changing. The noble Lord, Lord Maxton, is right about that. The rate of change that we have in this country is often underestimated, and we do not think about it carefully enough. In particular, I am concerned about the long-time effect of ageing; it is good, because we are all going to live to 120, and I am making plans. But the resilience of us individually, physically, will change society really dramatically, not only in the dependency ratio in terms of creation of wealth to pay for pensions but the ability to be able to contribute to your local community. I have lived in the same village for 30 years; I used to play football with my neighbours, but we now have book clubs and meet for interest evenings. Intellectually, everybody is as sharp as a knife, but we all have new knees or shoulders, or whatever—and God bless the National Health Service, which provides these things. But with the best will in the world, if something dramatic and untoward happened, the physical ability that we had when I first came to live where I do has gone. That is a really significant change, which we have not bottomed out yet.

On top of climate change and the global integration of society, specialisation is the order of the day and you all know a little bit about the life you live but everything else is done by everyone else, so if a bit of it goes wrong, the resilience of the system fails. The rate of change is something that we must be concerned about in the course of this debate.

Politics does not handle this particularly well. That is a statement of the obvious, but the timeframe is too long for normal party politics. I am in favour of party politics; I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, by the way, that we need to invest some money in party politics. My 32 year-old son has raised exactly that question about the pencil cross once every five years as being absolutely useless in terms of what he wants to contribute. He is right about that. But the political system considers capital expenditure as an easy target; if there is ever any pressure on any budget, the first thing that goes is capital expenditure—and nobody cares, because they do not really know about it. I am getting much more concerned about the effect of continually salami-slicing long-term plans; you do not see it from month to month or from year to year, but over the distance, you suddenly find that 85% of the petrol distribution in Scotland is in the hands of one man. The political process needs to waken up to that.

It is also a bad thing that it is so cross-departmental. The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, has had experience of many departments, and he is in a very good position to have an overview of this. The Civil Service is still in silos, and society does not live in silos as much as it used to. The Cabinet Office does its best, and it gets high marks for doing the important work that it is doing with big data, and trying to stay abreast of technological issues. But somebody needs to give me confidence that in central government there is somebody like the noble Lord, Lord Rooker—there may be a job for him—who stands back and can say, “In 15 or 20 years’ time we will be thinking of whatever it is”. We have the expertise here; we have the Meteorological Office, for example, which is a world expert at looking at climate change as it affects the weather. We need to think about how the political process deals with this long-term problem, which is becoming more and more of a problem.

The noble Lord, Lord Rooker, was absolutely right to mention housing. If we got a housing policy that was worth the name and were systematic and careful, it would transform the lives of many of our citizens. It would certainly start to seriously attack the housing benefit budget, which is just lining the pockets of landlords, and that is in no one’s long-term interest.

The Cabinet Office is the place where this whole issue is brigaded. It would help me if it could try to co-ordinate across departmental budgets the resources that are in play here. I do not blame Owen Paterson, the Secretary of State, for getting slightly blindsided about what was actually being spent on flooding, because some of it is private and some of it is public. It is an easy thing to do. But I have no sense of what is happening in the pockets of the other departmental budgets, which are dealing with long-term planning for resilience, climate change and the rest, and I do not know if the figure exists. I am well aware of the national risk register, which I remind noble Lords was drawn up in 2008. I know that it has been updated since then, but 2008 was a different world in the context of how we live these days. So I have a plea to my noble friend on the Front Bench, if he can do it today. It would certainly make me sleep more easily in my bed at night if I had more of a sense of what across the piece central government is applying to resources. I am talking not just of financial resources but of the capacity of experts and the scientists in the labs. What is the global spend across central government that deals with this issue? We should know about that, and about the professional experts that we can call on to deal with these crises, as we must in future.

The policy prima facie looks okay. I have looked at some of the documentation, and there is a spread of interest over the phase of prevention, mitigation response and aftermath, with regard to implementation. All those areas are covered and should be covered. However, on the resources issue, how much operational weight is there behind policy? The consultation that was conducted in Scotland found favour with most of the respondents, but people did not actually believe that the money was behind the policy to make it work in the way set out in the documentation, and we should think about that more carefully.

I want to talk for a moment or two about technology. The noble Lord, Lord Maxton, knows more about this than I do, but he is right to say that technology is quintessentially important in education. I want to take that argument further in terms of what it can do in the event of untoward, unexpected environmental crises. There is what is happening with cloud computing and the extra services that are available that are internet-based, and the mobile nature of devices. If you have an internet connection, you can speak to anybody in the world at any time, day or night. I compliment the Cabinet Office for the excellent work that it is doing, allowing big data to be made available to everybody, open source, so that they can take advantage of that wherever they are. I am told that in a few years’ time, 75% of all government information will be online, which is an astonishing change. That is a resource that we have never had before.

Finally, and most importantly in the context of this debate, social media give people the capacity to interconnect in a way that we have never known before. We are not taking enough advantage of that. For example, if my village were suddenly cut off for some reason, we have enough communal knowledge about computing to be able both to communicate within the village community, and to tell the emergency centre, our local government and our regional government headquarters exactly what is going on.

Indeed, as the noble Lord, Lord Maxton, knows, devices will soon be wearable. We will all have Google Glass, and go around wearing specs with cameras on them. I wait for the day when the Clerk of the Parliaments comes in and brings the House to order wearing his Google Glass device, because they will be able to stream that to Hong Kong. No doubt there are people in Hong Kong who would like to know what he is looking at. I am being facetious; none the less, that does make my point. If I am in the middle of a crisis in my village and I want to know what is happening, I can just switch my specs on. We need to invest in that, in the capacity and in the confidence building for people who will happily volunteer in their own communities and try to help their neighbours in an adverse situation. I think that if that is properly planned and worked out, we can transform our ability to communicate in real time.

Feedback is really important. What really cheeses people off in a flood is not being able to get through on the telephone line—and even when they can, getting the message, “We’ve got no information.” That is unacceptable. We should not allow public service contracts to be let to anybody, whether energy providers or anybody else, unless there is a clause in the contract saying something like, “In extremis, you must keep some percentage of resilience available—and you’re not getting your money unless you can convince the Civil Service people letting the contracts that you will run call centres or technological communication systems that will at least say to people, ‘I know who you are. I don’t know what’s going on but I’ll get back to you, and you can rely on that’—and it happens”.

Something else that we do not do well enough is the wash-up procedures and the feedback after the event—the aftermath. So there is a lot to do. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. This is a very important subject, and I hope that the House will return to it in future. I also hope that the political process will get a better handle on the real future risks that we face.