Barry Gardiner
MP for Brent West · Labour · United Kingdom
“Sir Desmond, imagine that the top brains in the country’s security and intelligence community produced a report that told you how to save the world. You would want to see it, right? Well, the report we are discussing is not about how to save the world; it is about what happens if we do not.”
“The nuclear threat will rise as clashes between nuclear powers become more frequent. Those are the cold assessments of the Joint Intelligence Committee. The Government were right to think that those assessments might scare people—they scare me—but they were wrong to think that they could hide them from the public.”
“The Minister will know that the grant structure on which UKRI is based gives out grants for a maximum of three to five years. Very few are for five years—most are for three years or under—yet the sort of long-term scientific development that my hon.”
“My hon. Friend is making a superb case for the importance of funding for her deep earth facility. I had the privilege of going to the National Oceanography Centre’s deep oceans facility, and the innovative science there on carbon sequestration is superb.”
“The Prime Minister has spoken powerfully about the devolution of power and giving back control. Will he therefore ensure that the proposals for commonhold and leasehold reform, for which 5 million leaseholders in this country are waiting with bated breath, do give that power and control back to those people, through the right to enfranchi…”
“We know how much land there is in the UK, and we know the extent of our inland waters and seas, so we can know how much we have to do to protect them, as we are required to do by target 3 of the global biodiversity framework.”
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“The Secretary of State has said that he did not know the content of the communications between his special adviser and BSkyB, but he did know that they were happening and he assured the House that he would publish all the communications between his Department and BSkyB. Why were those communications, which he did know of—even though he says he did not know their content—not included? After the meeting on 23 December at which we now know the Prime Minister discussed the bid, did the Prime Minister act in a transparent manner by communicating on 23 December or thereafter what he had said to the Department either in person to the Secretary of State or through his officials or advisers?”
“The IMF should be plan B; plan A should be the European Central Bank. Does the Chancellor not accept that until the ECB properly backs the euro, the only people who will welcome more money coming in through the IMF are the traders who are making much money by picking off the peripheral countries around Europe as they go from one to the other?”
“Could the hon. Gentleman enlighten the House as to his view of the patent box? The Chancellor first mentioned it in last year’s Budget—I think—although it was Lord Mandelson who introduced the concept in the first place.”
“If my right hon. Friend looks at all the Budget measures put through by the Labour Government, she will see that the average figure achieved by each measure to clamp down on tax avoidance was £1.8 billion. The most that this Government have managed is £0.8 billion.”
“Does the hon. Gentleman therefore disagree with the Chancellor, who said on Budget day that he wanted the approach to be applied not simply according to the black letter of the law, as the hon. Gentleman puts it, but according to the spirit of the law?”
“Surely a leak is an unauthorised or inadvertent publication of restricted and confidential information. On that basis, this could not have been a leak, because it was clearly not inadvertent and it was clearly authorised. It was none the less in severe conflict with the ministerial code, and that surely is what the Prime Minister should investigate.”
“The right hon. Gentleman says that the heavy lifting will be done by the rise in tax, but does he accept that there is a ratio of 4:1 in the amount that will come from cuts in public spending and benefits to the amount that will come from tax rises?”
“Does my right hon. Friend agree that one of the things that might look a little shakier later is the granny tax and the fact that 4.1 million people will be worse off in real terms, with an average loss of £83, and as a result of which 230,000 people will be brought into income tax?”
“The trouble with Budgets is that they tend to operate on a five-year cycle that has no relation to the actual cycles of the resources that we profess to manage. The immediacy of the political triumphs over the requirements of the actual. The focal point of this Budget is 2016-17, when the Government hope that the hole in the public finances will have been filled, but interestingly four fifths—more than £90 billion—of that filler comes from cuts in services and benefits, while only one fifth comes from rises in tax. Yet 73% of the tax rises have already been put in place, and less than 20% of the cuts in services and benefits have happened. The Government might think it prudent to delay the pain, but Government Back Benchers might care to reflect on what that has done to their electoral prospects.”
“As a result, we have an obligation to make sure that growth is sustainable, not simply to assume that it will be.”
“The Chancellor wants to set markets free and insists that we cannot spend our way out of debt, but he wilfully ignores Hayek’s equal insistence that the boom gets started with an expansion of credit—the very liquidity that the Chancellor has told the banks they must provide for business. Hayek would have been appalled to find his theories invoked by a Chancellor literally printing money through quantitative easing. In Hayek’s view, that leads only to unrealistically low interest rates and to the cycle of boom and bust starting all over again. Keynes of course believed in consumption-led growth as an economic stimulus, but he did not live in a world of 7 billion people. He assumed that growth was sustainable and natural resource was, for practical purposes, infinite. We know that it is not.”
“Or do we become the generation that understood that justice and sustainability are essentially the same thing? If you want peace in the world, create justice. If you want justice, live sustainably. We must get away from both sides of the political divide arguing that they uniquely possess the key to growth. We listen to the stale arguments about whether more spending now will raise growth and reduce the deficit more quickly, or whether less borrowing now will ultimately be a surer path to bring our economy back into GDP growth. But what both sides are talking about is yesterday’s economics: Hayek pitted against Keynes.”
“The hon. Gentleman refers to interest payments, but he knows that on that score this Government are paying out £150 billion more than they predicted, so his argument does not hold up. A Budget is a mechanism for the distribution and allocation of scarce resources, so let us examine what this Budget means for a child born today. A child born in my constituency today brings us this message: “By the time I reach my 18th birthday, the world will require 30% more fresh water, 45% more energy and 50% more food.” This child is part of the generation that will see the global population move from 7 billion to 10 billion people. How do we respond to this child? Do we become the most selfish generation of the most selfish species in our planet’s history?”
“If we wish to become a more equal society, then we need to consider the taxation of land and land use in different and more imaginative ways, for the benefit of society as a whole. The Chancellor sought in his Budget to bury another important piece of environmental news. Next Tuesday, the new national planning policy framework is published. That deserves our attention not least because we know that the Chancellor takes the view that the planning system is a blockage to economic growth. The NPPF will cause havoc up and down the country as planning uncertainty and ambiguity filters down to local communities. Fundamental to the new framework is the presumption in favour of sustainable development. In practice, this means—”
“Of course, there is a reason why almost a century later we have not yet been able properly to map the title of land in the UK—it is that so much of it has never been sold but has been passed down in families, from parent to child, in enormous estates. If the Government genuinely want to raise tax from the very wealthy, they should examine not only houses sold for over £2 million but the vast tracts of our country that have been accumulated in great estates for centuries and are still owned and managed not for the benefit of the population at large but to maximise the income and pleasure of a very few private individuals. I do not claim that all hereditary estates are badly managed in respect of the environment, but I do claim that good management comes not only as a result of inheritance. Land tax reform is long overdue.”
“They are regarded as free goods by the wider community, and in classical economics as externalities, and because they are not directly captured by a landowner they rarely feature in a landowner’s decision on how or whether to dispose of them. That is why the exercise of private property rights can often be to the public detriment. It is also why the role of the state in regulating the disposal of land is so important. Today we have heard much talk of stamp duty and how to raise revenue from the rich. It therefore seems quaint that no one has commented on the fact that the land registry for England, which was established in 1928, still accounts for only some 64% of the land in England, while in the registry for Scotland the figure drops to a mere 21%.”
“The pollination of our crops by insects, the stabilisation of our soil by trees and the regulation of our watershed by peat bogs are just some of the ecosystem services that a new economic model must begin to incorporate into our Government’s accounting framework. That new accounting renders inadequate the concept of GDP growth because it reveals one of the central conundrums of classical economics: that a country can become poorer while increasing its GDP. The Chancellor said nothing today that showed that he understood that. Another important consideration is that those wider benefits, although immensely valuable, do not accrue to an individual private property owner; they are experienced by a community at large.”
“What we have now begun to realise is that the air we breathe is not actually free—at least, it is not without a quantifiable value. Any sound cost-benefit analysis of public policy must take that value into account. The Environmental Audit Committee report on air pollution estimated that the costs from air pollution are up to £20.2 billion. That is the cost of respiratory and other diseases associated with poor air quality, both in treatment and lost productivity. The natural environment provides not just a physical stock of resources—forests and fish, minerals and fresh water that human beings depend on—but a network of services essential for human life.”
“We know that a well functioning legal system is very much a part of the wealth of a society, inviting commerce and trade to practise where certainty and redress prevail. That is certainly a form of capital different from a bridge, printing press or motorway, but we now measure them all in our assessment of the national wealth of a country. Resource economists now point out that we have left out of our economic calculations perhaps the most important capital of all: natural capital. We have left it out for a very simple reason—we always took it for granted. We thought that it was a free good. It cost us nothing and we assumed the supply was infinite. In the language of classical economics, natural capital was a mere externality, “as free as the air you breathe”.”
“It is a measure of the shame that the Government felt on reneging on the fourth carbon budget that they issued their press release in such a furtive manner. What is worse, what happened shows that the new Energy Secretary has no command over his brief and has been fingered by the Treasury as a weak Secretary of State. Since William Ewart Gladstone instituted the modern accounting and budgetary processes of the House of Commons 150 years ago, modern economics has come a long way in its understanding of capital. In Gladstone’s day, the notion of capital was very simple; it represented money and machinery. Gradually, we have come to realise that capital is not just money and plant. We have developed sophisticated concepts of social and intellectual capital.”
“The Budget simply does not address that technological challenge. It was extraordinary to see the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change join forces with the Treasury last Friday evening and issue a press release at 6 pm, embargoed until midnight, to exempt gas-fired power stations from the emissions controls set out in the fourth carbon budget by the Committee on Climate Change. Those emissions reductions were, in the Committee’s view, part of the necessary regulatory framework for achieving our target of at least 80% emissions reductions by 2050. The press release set out no alternative mechanisms that would be adopted to keep to those targets and no Minister has sought to expand on the issue since last week.”
“The hon. Gentleman precisely misconstrues my point; the issue is not about the amount of aid given to developing countries, but about understanding the valuation of natural capital and incorporating that into the Government’s accounting framework. That is in the natural environment White Paper, if he cares to read it. In a world of 7 billion people, growth can be sustainable only if it is predicated on advances that bring increased productivity and greater efficiency in the use of resources. That is what Hayek would have called a sound capital structure and proper allocation of capital. For the world to continue to achieve a 3% per annum growth target, and to maintain a trajectory that keeps carbon emissions below the 2°C threshold of dangerous climate change, we must increase our productivity per tonne of carbon emitted 15 times over.”
“The hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) is absolutely right; there has been no debate on UKTI—not only in this Parliament but in the entire previous Parliament. It is indicative that the hon. Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) and I, who have both run businesses, have initiated this debate.”
“The redoubtable hon. Member for South Thanet has illustrated that UKTI is, in its current state, not yet that organisation. It lags behind other countries’ organisations in promoting investment abroad and at home.”
“In the past 15 years, the United States has adjusted to refocusing its attention more towards the Pacific than the Atlantic. In those circumstances, we have seen the benefits of Indian companies, such as Tata Global, investing in British companies such as Tetley. We have seen the benefits of British companies, such as BAE, expanding overseas and, in doing so, boosting our economy. It is imperative that we have the skills and institutions that can facilitate such investments. We need an organisation that can identify opportunity overseas and channel UK companies in a co-ordinated supply chain to meet it; one that can source overseas investors and persuade them that UK companies are the perfect fit for their investment to yield above-sector returns for them and for new jobs and growth in the UK. That organisation should be UKTI.”
“I could, but I would rather refer the hon. Gentleman to the pamphlet that I wrote on the matter following the general election. I fear that if I were to begin on the point now, it might take up more time than we have available. If the UK is to emerge from its current economic stagnation, it must do so by trade. The opportunities from trade and investment lie not only in our own abilities but in the accurate assessment of the economic opportunities in, and performance of, other countries. We have seen a definite shift in economic power. With the rise of India, China and Brazil, there is a new global dynamic, so there are now new global opportunities. We have seen the eurozone’s problems, as it struggles to pull itself out of recession.”
“The hon. Gentleman makes an absolutely perfect point. I am very happy to acknowledge it and support exactly what he says. UKTI should not simply be looking at the present, and it should not simply be looking at the short to medium term. It should have a strategic overview of where the UK’s trade and investment interests lie into the foreseeable future—that is absolutely right.”
“I think that I should just take interventions and not make my speech, because every one of them is excellent. The hon. Member for The Cotswolds is right. I disagreed with him on his earlier points about RDAs, but on this point I agree: benchmarking and international comparators are essential if we are to see what we are doing. Also, there must be much closer scrutiny, performance management and benchmarking within UKTI to ensure that we are delivering what we promised. I will mention accountability in that sense later.”
“Just last month, BAE lost out to the French company, Dassault Aviation, for a contract with the Indian air force worth £7 billion to the UK economy. We cannot afford to lose, and we should not be losing, such a contract.”
“Consider what Dr Wu Kegang, chief China adviser to the British Chambers of Commerce, told the BBC last year. He said that Chinese investors “have no idea how to enter the British market. They don’t know how to build business channels inside the UK to promote their innovative brands and products”. Global economic power is shifting from west to east and UKTI is failing to adjust adequately to the new reality. The UK is falling behind in investment in BRIC countries; inward foreign direct investment is dropping; and our global share of trade has slumped. Recently, the news has been dominated by the difficulties that British companies are facing in securing contracts over their foreign competitors.”
“I would that every debate I participated in shed as much light on the subject as this one appears to be doing, without my saying a word. My hon. Friend, who chairs the Business, Innovation and Skills Committee, speaks with great knowledge on the subject and has pinpointed one of the key problems. It is a problem not simply for UKTI but for government as a whole. Government is keen to measure outputs, but reticent about measuring outcomes. That process transformation is required, as my hon. Friend’s Select Committee has pointed out. While Germany and France bolster their economies with effective trading bodies, UKTI presents itself to those who use it as slack, unfocused, inefficient and even, in some cases, a deterrent to investors.”
“We are the sixth largest manufacturing economy in the world, yet we represent just 1% of India’s imports. If that is not cause for shame and alarm, it should be.”
“One might claim that recent events in the eurozone and the United States have impacted on such figures, but the statistics for the so-called BRICs are just as unimpressive. The United States remains the biggest recipient of outward UK investment. India, whose economic growth has topped 7% almost annually for the past 10 years, is down in 18th place, while China, the world’s largest economy, is 24th. Between now and 2030, GDP in the BRIC countries as a proportion of world GDP will increase by 40%, yet more than 65% of UK trade is done in north America and Europe. Indeed, British involvement with emerging economies has been waning. The UK dropped from seventh to fourth in the list of India’s largest export markets, but went down to 22nd place for imports from number three and now accounts for just 1% of all imports into India.”
“We enjoy significant cultural, historic and economic ties with many countries currently experiencing economic growth. London is the world’s financial capital, and we have a long and proud history of manufacturing. With the right attitude, focus and know-how, UKTI can provide a firm footing for Britain to re-establish economic growth. As it stands, however, it is failing. The UK has lost market share in trade and investment. According to the Office for National Statistics, foreign companies invested £32 billion in the UK in 2010—a decrease of £16 billion from 2009. More significantly, because some people may challenge that on the basis of the recession, that was the lowest value since 2004. In 2010, outward foreign direct investment by UK companies decreased to £23 billion—the lowest FDI outflow in 16 years.”
“I am delighted that I was able to provoke the Minister’s intervention, because that is exactly the fighting talk that I wanted to hear. The hon. Member for South Thanet started by talking about your both being on the beaches, Mr Amess, and clearly the Minister is still fighting on them, so that is good. This is a time when the UK should be taking every advantage afforded it to it. The difficulties created by recession and the crisis in the eurozone are considerable. That is why we need to expand our horizons, seeking new and innovative ways to attract investment and finding opportunities abroad. UKTI and British industry, generally, possess some remarkable advantages, many of which have been mentioned by the hon. Lady in her opening remarks.”
“Eight of UKTI’s 10 board members have no background in business, thus undermining the organisation’s ability effectively to identify investment opportunities and support inward and outward investors. Again, I refer to Ernst and Young’s CBI report, which states: “more could be done to link UKTI and embassy staff to the plethora of trade associations operating in local markets.””
“We have to be honest with ourselves if we are to make a proper analysis of the organisation and put those defects rights. There is a dearth of credible financial and structural information available on UKTI. The National Audit Office stated that UKTI cannot measure its effectiveness or account for its expenditures because of a lack of accurate information. Our own National Audit office is saying that. The Government allocated an additional £45 million to UKTI in 2011, and it is most concerning that we are pouring money into a body that, according to the National Audit Office, has no oversight or accountability. Evidence from within British industries has highlighted the failure of UKTI’s approach.”
“In a survey of exporters conducted by the CBI, only 12.8% of respondents described UKTI as excellent, while the verdict of 15.4% of respondents was that it was unsuitable or poor, and many organisations, of course, did not respond at all. UKTI claims that for every pound invested in it, £22 is returned to the British economy—I am not indulging in flights of fantasy—but in UKTI’s own survey of British exporters working through UKTI, 46% of respondents indicated they would have achieved the same outcome without using UKTI. Let us not come out with silly statistics showing that for every pound that goes into UKTI, £22 comes back to the British economy, when UKTI’s own survey tells us that most people think they would have achieved exactly the same result without using UKTI.”
“The figures provided in its own reports show little consistency, and there is a great deal of obfuscation regarding the allocation of resources and staff. There is also little or no clear delineation of duties or responsibilities between UKTI, the Foreign Office, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the Treasury. The result is an overlap in what the various Departments do and, I assume, a duplication of effort. That lack of organisational clarity gives way to inefficiencies and a failure properly to undertake functions. The evidence from business—I stress that it comes from business—is that UKTI is not an unuseful organisation, but it could do much more. In a survey conducted by the National Audit Office, 30% of respondents mentioned receiving some benefit from UKTI, but 40% indicated they had received no benefit at all.”
“Meanwhile, our goods exports have grown by only 1% per annum, compared with 3% in the US and 5% in Germany. A report conducted by Ernst and Young for the CBI noted: “UK outflows are concentrated on the EU and the US, with negligible investment going to high-growth economies.” The failure properly to engage with emerging markets is, however, not limited to the BRICs. There are no stated bilateral trade targets for Egypt or South Korea, despite both countries being designated as high-growth markets in UKTI’s current five-year strategy. There are also no stated bilateral trade targets for Bangladesh, Indonesia or the Philippines. Although it is, of course, unfair to blame all those things on UKTI, they serve to underline the organisation’s inefficiencies. UKTI has masked its weaknesses through a lack of accountability.”
“Coming from such a constituency, I echo the sentiments expressed by the hon. Member for Enfield North (Nick de Bois). It is upon the experience, contacts and family connections of my constituents and, I presume, his that we must build a much stronger trade relationship. This question must be asked of UKTI: why are emerging markets not at the forefront of British investment now? It should be UKTI’s role to facilitate investment abroad. The statistics reflect UK companies investing where it is easy, not where they can maximise return and not with an eye to future market share. That has a knock-on impact for British trade generally. The UK’s share of global exports has fallen from 5.3% in 2000 to 4.1% in 2010—a long-term trend of decline, I agree, since the 1950s. In the same decade, however, German exports grew from 8.9% to 9.3%.”
“The hon. Gentleman is right. Indeed, for precisely those reasons, I set up the all-party parliamentary group on UK-India trade and investment a number of years ago, to take advantage of the constituency links that he and the hon. Member for South Thanet have mentioned. We must capitalise on these things. They are the stuff of which business is made. Business is made not simply by good products and good marketing, but by people and contacts and by people who are able to go out and get business and do the deal. Someone might have the best product in the world, but if they do not have such a relationship, things will not happen. That is the hallmark of successful business. In my constituency, more than 130 languages are spoken in our schools, and in one school, in a class of 29 children, 21 different first languages are spoken.”
“It is clear that we must redouble our efforts to attract investment and ensure that UKTI is properly funded, fully accountable and working effectively.”
“We are simply highlighting what service users are saying, not because we wish to embarrass UKTI, talk down British industry or undermine the Government and the Minister, but because we share the concern that Britain is not punching at the weight that it should be—or, far less, above it. All institutions, but particularly Government institutions, should be accountable, and the debate has given us a valuable opportunity to highlight UKTI’s role, so I pay tribute to the hon. Member for South Thanet for her inspiration in initiating it. Our intention has been to provide constructive criticism and to create wider awareness in Parliament of UKTI’s role in promoting UK trade and investment. Evidence from industry and recent experience are instructive.”
“The testimony of ADS, which represents the UK aerospace, defence, security and space industries, is particularly telling. Despite UKTI’s defence and security sector being larger than all its other sectors combined, ADS has observed that there needs to be a reorientation towards the BRIC countries and an increase in the number of sector specialists. The City of London corporation raised similar concerns over its UKTI sector. It identified a “reduced...capacity limiting ability to support the delivery of overseas initiatives” and commented: “reduced resources for UKTI are having a detrimental impact on the effectiveness of UKTI in encouraging inward investment”. Such comments provide valuable feedback from service users; this is not about Her Majesty’s Opposition or Back Benchers quibbling and cavilling.”
“I am always happy to listen to a freeman of the city of Liverpool, as I understand the noble Lord now is. Of course secondments and exchanges, such as those that the hon. Gentleman mentions, are sensible and important, but it would be better for people to have real commercial experience in the first place. That goes back to the remark the hon. Member for South Thanet made in opening the debate: however intelligent someone is, a first in classics from Oxbridge does not qualify them to do business or run UKTI. We have some brilliant civil servants, but if they do not have hands-on experience of running a business, filling in VAT forms, hiring and firing people or doing all the things that the Minister, the hon. Lady and I have done, they will find it difficult to get down to enabling others to do them.”
“I am grateful to the Minister for the way in which he is taking on board and synthesising the constructive criticisms that have been made. Does the Minister agree that in taking groups of people out from this country, it is important that we take a complete supply chain to the prospective client country? Instead of simply taking out individual companies, we should look to put together supply chains that can meet the infrastructural, other developmental and business needs of that country, and show that within the UK, we can manage an entire supply chain for it.”
“Having pointed the finger elsewhere in Europe, would the hon. Lady care to comment on a recent case in the United Kingdom—indeed, in Scotland? There was a parallel landing industry, and the Government were taking levies from it.”
“Indeed, the CFP was significantly reformed in 2002 with a view to implementing the principles of ecosystem-based management. The tragedy is that that has not been reflected in practice. True ecosystem-based fisheries management would require systemic reform through the introduction of a regionalised management framework. A regionalised management system within Europe would divide EU fisheries into management regions according to ecosystems rather than nations. Unfortunately, fish do not carry passports and do not know when they are travelling from one nation’s waters into another’s, so we must look at ecosystems and not simply national boundaries.”
“The history of our coastal areas sadly bears witness to that, as fishing communities from Stonehaven to Newcastle and from Grimsby to Cornwall have declined over the past century and a half. It is always comfortable for Members of Parliament to support small fishing communities, particularly those in their constituency, but we should also have the courage to point out that the demise of fishing communities is the result of their parents and grandparents’ over-fishing. The ecosystem-based approach is fundamental to sustainable environmental management. It establishes a strategy for the management and sustainable use of natural resources by considering them in the context of their role in the entire ecosystem. The current CFP and the EU marine strategy framework directive already commit the EU in principle to that approach.”