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Finally, the highest industrial priority we should have, which is of crucial importance, is that we should make a real effort to go for nuclear power. This is not only because of global warming, although, of course, it meets the demands for controlling it. When the noble Lord, Lord Sainsbury—an extremely effective science Minister in this House—had the courage to say that nuclear power is indeed a renewable, many people did not like it. But he said that from the Front Bench. We need to save hydrocarbons, not only because of the Middle East situation but also because of Mr Putin, in whom we perhaps have diminishing confidence. We must meet future energy demand through nuclear power.
Big developments are taking place throughout the world. Interestingly, the thorium reactor has been introduced in India instead of the uranium reactor. Thorium is a new technology invented by the Indians and has the great advantage that it does not produce plutonium. The Chinese are busily increasing their output of nuclear power and the United States at last—after 35 years of stagnation in a field where it once led the world—is also turning in that direction. I hope very much that Her Majesty’s Government will do the same and that my party will support them.
6.48 pm
Lord Beaumont of Whitley: My Lords, there are many things in the gracious Speech that the sole Green Party representative in Parliament might have chosen to speak on. For a time, I was tempted to speak on international affairs to protest against our illegal involvement in two wars and to point out that no one had ever dabbled in the affairs of Afghanistan or Mesopotamia with profit to anyone concerned. Not all that long ago, the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association sent me to Tonga. I learnt there that there is a lot to be said for a policy of no entanglements and dubbing one’s islands the Friendly Islands.
Even two illegal wars are not the most important matters on our plate. Much the most important and dangerous problem is climate change. We very much welcome the forthright challenge of the Stern report, in which the risks of making only small cuts in our CO2 production are laid out in full, including the risk of an increasing likelihood of
The major changes include the melting of the Greenland icecap and the resultant six-metre rise in the sea level that this implies, which will affect London, New York, Shanghai and Mumbai.
While mentioning Mumbai, perhaps I may say that I have not heard a better maiden speech in my 37
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For the UK to do its share to avoid such drastic consequences, annual reductions of 9 per cent are needed to cut CO2 production to 90 per cent of 1990 levels by 2030. That is the Green Party’s message. The modest 3 per cent cuts envisaged by the Climate Change Bill are simply not sufficient. Annual reductions in production of 9 per cent may sound ambitious but are not impossible, requiring only political will in the place of political rhetoric.
The first necessary economic steps include putting an effective value on carbon emissions through a capped, tradable quota system. They include ending airport expansion and embarking on serious investment in energy efficiency and renewables. They include market mechanisms such as the feed-in tariff scheme deployed by Germany, Japan and Spain, which has resulted in Germany installing 56 per cent of the world’s solar panels.
By paying households to generate clean, green electricity, such feed-in tariff schemes can be used to shift our electricity production by making investment in renewables cost-effective for the individual. And let no one sneer at the efforts made by Mr Cameron. These are early days in exploring the way forward, and Mr Cameron is at least trying.
We also need to take responsibility for all the carbon production in the whole of our economy. After the demise of much of British manufacturing and the coal industry, it should come as no shock to noble Lords to learn, carbon emissions in Britain briefly dipped in the early 1990s. But, in truth, those now rising levels of CO2 emissions are an underestimate of what our economic activity produces, for we are now exporting CO2 production to China and other countries. Products manufactured abroad use carbon in production and transit. The production is counted in the carbon figures where it is produced and the transportation, under the Kyoto protocol, is not considered at all. If we took those factors into account, our society would be seen to produce around 20 per cent more carbon emissions. The most obvious and significant conclusion is that if we were to meet our needs for food, clothing and household goods from local, sustainable production, we could drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
The Green Party advocates a system of strengthened local economies where we have a role as producers as well as consumers, thus not only reducing our impact on climate change but reinforcing our identity and self-esteem within local communities. Trade should return to its right role as the exchange of goods we cannot produce within our own economies. This seems far from the thrust of current economic thinking on any of the Front Benches, which ought to be a source of deep concern to us all. Instead, we continue to hear from them about competitiveness in a globalised economy which provides ever cheaper goods, manufactured abroad for consumption in countries such as ours. Such a view is fundamentally incompatible with serious and sufficient action on climate change.
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Without addressing these fundamental measures, the Government and the Opposition continue to be insufficiently ambitious and wrongly focused for the sake of supposed economic stability, thereby risking catastrophic climate events. The Green Party, however, believes that we must begin to localise our economies into more efficient and sustainable units to guarantee the future of our planet and economy. Such a vision offers greater community and personal satisfaction—a world where conviviality replaces consumption, where local identity replaces global trade and where community spirit replaces brand loyalty.
6.54 pm
Lord Haskel: My Lords, I echo the Minister’s fine words about my noble friend Lord Sainsbury and agree that my noble friend’s contribution has been quite outstanding.
Quite rightly, the gracious Speech starts with stability in the economy and how that is the foundation of a fair and prosperous society. Like other noble Lords, I congratulate the Government on consistently and successfully working at this policy over the past 10 years and welcome the promise to continue working towards the same objective. It is very laudable.
Your Lordships have already debated public services, immigration, health, security and the role of the state, global warming and foreign policy. Today it is the turn of business and the economy. The Government are wise to have launched policy reviews covering virtually all these issues. By looking to the future, they will revitalise themselves—that is what progressive Governments do.
Of course, the Tories are carrying out the same reviews, but let me say to the Front Bench opposite that, although the issues may be similar, their reviews have a different feel. Instead of being about the future, they seem more about escaping from the past. With apologies to the noble Lord, Lord Marlesford, they seem to be about holding an inquest into Thatcherism. Perhaps the explanation is that these reviews are being carried out by people loaded down with the baggage of the past, and all that baggage has yet to be unloaded.
Recently the Government have initiated a number of reviews designed to help business, led largely by people from business. We have had reports on housing, the health service and cutting red tape; we are promised reports on how to improve the transport infrastructure, deal with the skills gap and the financial health of the creative industries. With all that work going on, I find it difficult to understand why the CBI and the Institute of Directors accuse the Government of lack of support for business. This seems based on the level of corporation tax; the words of the noble Lord, Lord Sanderson, reflected that. In my business experience, tax is only one part of the equation.
Last week we had the Varney review, which dealt specifically with relations between business and the tax authorities, and how to improve them. I hope that noble Lords opposite will agree that this, too, is business-friendly, and that they will not provide comfort to the tax avoidance industry by querying the review.
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The most important report, of course, has been the Stern report on climate change. It was welcomed by business and Government alike, with the exception of my noble friend Lord Barnett. It stimulated the promised Climate Change Bill. Indeed, business asked for long-term goals to reduce carbon emissions plus a legal framework in which to achieve that because long-term certainty will enable business to invest in the equipment and technology to achieve this reduction. I hope that the Minister will assure me that the Bill will also put in place monitoring and reporting arrangements so that it is fairly administered. Business is in agreement with this objective; indeed, some firms already say that they are carbon-neutral, and many more say that they are working towards this objective. Detailed confirmation appears in company annual reports all the time. I hope that the determination of many companies to become carbon-neutral will persuade the Tories to stop flip-flopping on this issue and that they will firmly support the Bill.
The real challenge is to maintain our continuing prosperity while achieving a low-carbon economy. The noble Lord, Lord Newby, is right: business has to meet this challenge and produce the action for which the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, called. The challenge lies not only in the more efficient use of energy, waste reduction and carbon trading but also in the materials that we use. Metals, plastics, rubber, textiles, packaging, composites and building materials represent an enormous part of our economy—some say nearly 20 per cent. All over the world, people will have to adapt to these new pressures. Some materials will have to be substituted by other more sustainable ones that use less metal or require less water. Others will have to be used in different combinations and quantities. In addition, we will have to look at reuse, disassembly and recycling on a scale far greater than in the past. That will involve redesigning many products, which will provide the kind of entrepreneurial opportunity that the noble Lord, Lord Wade, spoke about. How will we tackle this? The materials community is diverse but, fortunately, some time ago in this country the Materials, Innovation and Growth Team realised that the differentiation of materials, one from another, is becoming less important. It is more important to look at what materials communities can share so that they and their supply chains can satisfy consumers’ needs in an increasingly sustainable and innovative way.
My noble friend Lord Bhattacharyya referred to the work of the DTI and the Technology Strategy Board. For this purpose, they formed Materials UK. I declare an interest: I was invited to be its honorary president. Interestingly, these mighty companies of the materials industry asked the design companies and organisations to join them. Jonathan Ive, who designed the Apple iPod—he comes from Newcastle—explained why rather well. He said he tried to design products that solved problems and that truly innovative companies often had to change their approach to how they develop, evaluate, make and market products. In this country, our creative capability is an important national resource. Participating in efforts such as Materials UK makes a lot of sense.
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Both maiden speakers spoke of the problem-solving, innovation- and design-based, research-based, service-giving, brand-promoting, fast-moving economy—now referred to as the knowledge and creative economy. I agree with them. Much future wealth lies there. Happily, it is growing and expanding in this country all the time, but I am not sure whether we are aware how much, or whether our national statistics fully represent this kind of economy and present a true picture. We capture very well our investment in buildings, the equipment in them, our labour and the products and services, but do these figures really capture a knowledge economy? Are we quantifying creativity and the marketing of knowledge? Are we measuring our trade in best practice, innovation and product design, brand building and many of the other things which are required in order to compete in today’s global sustainable economy? A piece of packaged software is measurable, but what about the far greater amount of software which is not packaged? What about the skills which we import through immigration and those we export through know-how, services and the creative industry?
The noble Lord, Lord Moser, explained why the Statistics and Registration Services Bill mentioned in the Queen’s Speech is so important. He and the noble Lord, Lord Jenkin, told us that one purpose of the Bill is to raise public confidence in our national statistics by putting the Office for National Statistics under an independent board beyond the reach of politicians, which is laudable and desirable. But statistics must also reflect what is actually going on in our economy. Perhaps the Bill also can help with the transparency for which the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, called.
The Minister who is to reply, a former distinguished accountant, knows about this. Perhaps he listed a lot of these investments as intangibles and, as a result, they never appeared in our statistics, but now these intangibles play a crucial role in our competitiveness. So I hope that he will ensure that the board of the Office for National Statistics will guarantee not only that the work is independent and of high quality, but also that the output is comprehensive so that it measures what is really going on in our modern knowledge economy. Without that, our national statistics may be accurate and independent, but they may also be incomplete and misleading and will fall into all the perils which the noble Lord, Lord Moser, told us about.
Most speakers seem to agree that we cannot master the challenges ahead in the old ways. It requires new politics and new business models. I, and other noble Lords, have tried to provide a few signposts. I hope that the Government are listening.
7.05 pm
Lord Currie of Marylebone: My Lords, I should like to focus on communications and, within that, the increasingly convergent industries of telecommunications and broadcasting. I have to declare an interest as chairman of Ofcom, which received its duties and powers from the Communications Act 2003, which your Lordships’ House spent a great deal of time considering. The UK communications sector plays a
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I think it is fair to say that we have a strong story to tell about the UK communications sector. Consumers enjoy lower prices for a widening array of services. Competition has driven down the price of residential services by one-third on average in the past five years. Research published by Ofcom last week shows that this has not come at the expense of customer satisfaction, which remains high, nor of choice, which is wider than ever. For the first time, total household spend on communications fell during the past year. We are getting more for less. But greater competition and choice also raise wider social policy questions and the need for effective consumer protection. I therefore welcome in principle the Government’s intention as part of their legislative programme to give consumers a stronger and more coherent voice, but, importantly, in a way that leaves unchanged the highly effective consumer representation in Ofcom through the consumer panel given by the Communications Act. I look forward to the detailed debate of these proposals.
Under the Communications Act, Parliament rightly gave Ofcom marching orders that involved a complex balancing of a range of duties; that is, to drive competition, choice and deregulation, which has been emphasised particularly in this debate, to sustain the range of public service broadcasting and to provide appropriate safeguards for consumers and citizens. Sometimes these duties pull in different directions and entail more rather than less regulation. To take a case in point: our recent proposals on the restriction of TV advertising to children of food high in fat, sugar and salt shows that conflict of duties. On the one hand, there is concern about the influence of advertising on the diets of our children and, on the other hand, concern to maintain the quality of UK-originated children’s programming. We have had to consider carefully the evidence that TV advertising shapes children’s food preferences. But other influences, particularly parents, are much more significant. Some draconian measures, such as a pre-watershed ban which is favoured by many, would cut broadcast revenue by more than the entire commercial TV-sector spend on children’s programming and national news coverage combined. We have had to consider carefully what goes into children’s stomachs but also what goes into their minds, and judge what we think to be proportionate and effective action—regulatory, to be sure, not deregulatory, but, in our view, proportionate. Inevitably, however, the decision has not been without controversy.
I have spoken about how competition and choice have taken hold over the past few years, to the general benefit of consumers. Ofcom welcomes the Government’s measures to simplify regulation wherever possible—although I have illustrated that sometimes it is not
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One could argue that that operational separation was a regulatory intervention deep into the heart of BT’s business; more interventionist, possibly, than what went before. However, it has enabled major deregulation of other parts of BT, with substantial benefits overall. The high level of investment in local loop unbundling deep in the network signals the wider benefits of this policy, and supports the view that competition benefits consumers much more than retail price controls.
Market mechanisms have been extended to that other crucial national asset, the radio spectrum, an economic asset now worth at least 3 per cent of GDP. We will see, as a result of the extension of market trading, the radio spectrum’s value and importance growing further, together with a flourishing of innovation as new services and technologies find it easier to gain and trade spectrum rights. Over the next three years Ofcom will make available a large tranche, 400 megahertz, of new, prime spectrum. Together with the liberalisation of existing spectrum use and allowing spectrum trading, this will make it easier for new applications and technologies to emerge faster for innovative companies to bring new services to market and thus for consumers to benefit quickly.
Already we are seeing the emergence of new technologies that could make dramatically more efficient use of the available spectrum and render its scarcity less of a factor. When the next big thing emerges, its spectrum needs will be met by the market, not regulatory fiat. That will make it more likely to emerge quickly, and more likely to emerge in the UK than elsewhere.
Within that major use of spectrum broadcasting, the changes are no less significant. How public service broadcasting is sustained through the transition to a fully digital world is a crucial question, particularly now that digital switchover is a near-term reality. The BBC has a central role to play in the provision of public service broadcasting, but we need to sustain plurality of provision in the digital world, as we have had in the analogue world. That is why we are undertaking a major review of the finances of Channel 4, thinking hard about the future of television news reporting and fleshing out the idea of a public service publisher.
The noble Lord, Lord Truscott, has spelt out the considerable benefits that will flow from digital switchover, and I will not repeat them. The process will affect every household in the UK. It is right, therefore, that the Government are bringing forward urgently needed measures to ensure that the
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Looking ahead, we should recognise that the digital age will bring important challenges to the traditional model of linear broadcasting to mass audiences. Traditional TV and broadband are colliding, as viewers switch to content delivered on demand via the internet and online viewing cuts into traditional TV viewing. Internet content is viewed within a different context, if not in a different way. I have no doubt that consumers will need to rely much more in future on self-regulation and co-regulation of that content, probably taking advantage of smart navigational devices that will become available, and much less on the centralised decisions of the Ofcom Content Board. It is welcome, therefore, that the British Government have successfully argued against a general extension of content regulation to the internet, in the context of the review of the audio-visual media services directive that has been considered by Sub-Committee B of the European Committee of your Lordships’ House. The old model of content regulation cannot be extended to new media and to internet content, and will come under pressure elsewhere as well.
I cannot leave broadcasting without alluding to a more immediate issue. Your Lordships will not have missed the widespread and sometimes noisy comments in the press on the recent acquisition by BSkyB of 17.9 per cent of ITV’s shares. Ofcom has invited both ITV and BSkyB to comment on whether this acquisition represents a change of control in any of ITV’s licences. We will in due course consider the evidence on that point, as the Communications Act requires us to do. I have little doubt that your Lordships will be hearing much more about this in the coming weeks.
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