Spending Review 2025

Lord Lemos Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

The noble Baroness and I, along with many others in this House, have discussed these issues many times before. I think she knows that what she wants and what I want and what the Government want are pretty much the same thing. She says she wants to see greater levels of investment by pension funds into UK assets, and that is exactly what we want to see as well. The Chancellor set out some proposals on that in her Mansion House speech last year. We have seen substantial pension fund reform announced by this Government, which should bring an additional £50 billion of investment into the UK. We have seen the Mansion House compact announced just last week—a voluntary scheme by pension fund providers to get more investment into the UK. The Chancellor will make her next Mansion House speech on 1 July. I hope this will include more interesting announcements on this regard. It will also include the financial services growth and competitiveness strategy, which I hope will achieve many of the things that the noble Baroness is talking about.

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest: from 2018 to 2025 I was the lead non-executive director of His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service. Can my noble friend the Minister tell us how much the Government are having to spend to rectify the appalling failure of the last Government to address the prison capacity crisis and all its consequences?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

My noble friend is absolutely right, and I pay tribute to the expertise that he brings to this question. In the summer of 2024, at the time of the election, prisons were operating at over 99% capacity. Clearly, the previous Government, as I was saying before, did not believe in investment spending, because they kept cutting it. Our social fabric was in a terrible state when we took over. We are having to do a lot of investment spending now to make up for the damage done over 14 years. The Government in this spending review are providing £7 billion to deliver 14,000 new prison places by 2031.