Results 1-20 of 49 for speaker:Lord Turnbull

Schools: Statutory Instruments (Merits Committee Report): Motion to Take Note (19 Jun 2009)

Lord Turnbull: My Lords, I am not a member of the Merits Committee, but I have two interests that are relevant to the debate, the experience of which will I hope corroborate the excellent report that the committee has produced. First, I am the chairman of the governors of an independent school, Dulwich College, and, secondly, I am chairman of the shadow board of trustees of the Isle of Sheppey academy, of...

Banking Bill: Commons Amendment (11 Feb 2009)

Lord Turnbull: My Lords, as a co-sponsor of the original amendment, I naturally welcome the fact that the other place, in its wisdom, has decided to work with the spirit of the amendment rather than resist it and leave us all hunting through myriad documents for the information to which we are entitled. Nevertheless, there are still some things that puzzle me. As the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, said, the...

Banking Bill: Report (2nd Day) (3 Feb 2009)

Lord Turnbull: My Lords, the other issue that I would have raised on what was Clause 228, now Clause 235, was whether creating a Financial Stability Committee within the Bank, along the lines currently proposed, was the best way forward. I accept that the starting premise of this is correct: the Bank would benefit from what might be called ventilation, or exposure to a greater degree of outside thinking. It...

Banking Bill: Report (2nd Day) (3 Feb 2009)

Lord Turnbull: My Lords, I regret that I was unable to attend the latter part of the Committee stage, when what is now Clause 235 was debated. I congratulate those who stayed to the bitter end at gone two o'clock in the morning on their stamina. Had I been present, I would have supported the concerns expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, and the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell. The principal shortcoming of...

Banking Bill: Report (2nd Day) (3 Feb 2009)

Lord Turnbull: My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, has justified this amendment, the primary purpose being to ensure proper parliamentary accountability of the way the powers provided in this Bill are exercised. It also provides, as she has said, a pragmatic solution to the issue of whether market intervention should be kept confidential—that is, that information may be withheld, but should be...

Banking Bill: Report (2nd Day) (3 Feb 2009)

Lord Turnbull: My Lords, there is a general principle about which I am unclear. We seem to be in a position where the amount of expenditure will be disclosed but the recipient will not. We have to ask ourselves whether that should always be the case. If a bank in trouble is assisted by the authorities, but in the mean time goes, for example, to find people who can raise capital and it puts the deficit in...

Banking Bill — Committee (5th Day) (26 Jan 2009)

Lord Turnbull: Like the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, I do not understand why, if something is urgent under proposed subsection (4) of Amendment 174, it then also has to have anonymity under proposed subsection (5). There may be circumstances in which anonymity, secrecy or delayed release of the information is justified but it should not apply in every case in which the urgency condition has been invoked.

Committee (1st Day) (13 Jan 2009)

Lord Turnbull: We are having a semantic debate about "temporary", but it seems to be based on an assumption that there is an entity which is taken into the public sector, and that there is an entity which is ultimately returned to the private sector. That may not be the case at all. You could take a bank into public ownership, and the bank could be broken up into different pieces, from different assets at...

Department of Energy and Climate Change (16 Oct 2008)

Lord Turnbull: My Lords, there are advantages in bringing together two intertwined issues such as energy and climate change, but there is an important proviso, which is that no one faction within a department becomes dominant and drowns out the voice of the other. I regret that this happened once in my experience in the early days of the Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions. The roads...

Planning Bill (14 Oct 2008)

Lord Turnbull: I agree that there are two basic issues here. The first is: one House or two? Certain features of our parliamentary work are reserved for the other place—for example, the Finance Bill—but I cannot see that planning is one of them. I am beginning to think that the other place has got into the habit of conflating the word "Commons" and the word "Parliament", when they are two...

Planning Bill (14 Oct 2008)

Lord Turnbull: No case should ever go to the IPC on the basis of a stale NPS. That is the abuse that we want to stop. There may be an NPS where the project has taken place and there are no further applications. It is not necessary to review an NPS in which there is no prospect of any cases being brought in that area. However, where cases are being brought, I agree that there should be a presumption, created...

Planning Bill (14 Oct 2008)

Lord Turnbull: I suspect that, like other Members of the Committee, I am finding it difficult to fathom the game plan of the opposition Front Bench in general on the Bill and on these clauses in particular. Two weeks ago, the leader of the Conservative Party announced a commitment to a big expansion of the high-speed rail network in this country. Surely he must be thinking that, should he ever come to...

Planning Bill (8 Oct 2008)

Lord Turnbull: I support the noble Baroness. If the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, were accepted, Clause 5(3) would read: "Before designating a statement as a national policy statement for the purposes of this Act the Sustainable Development Commission must carry out an appraisal". In other words, the Sustainable Development Commission then designates the statement as national...

Planning Bill (6 Oct 2008)

Lord Turnbull: If I did mention the Inland Revenue, I would not describe it as a department. Most of my other examples were courts, tribunals, the Monetary Policy Committee and so on, so it is not a question of departments or civil servants working for Ministers.

Planning Bill (6 Oct 2008)

Lord Turnbull: I thank those who produced the Marshalled List for doing so in a way that brings together all the clauses, so allowing us to debate the central issue of whether the commission should take decisions or whether it is an advisory body. I believe—backed partly by experience for four years as permanent secretary to the Department for the Environment, seared by planning inquiries such as...

Finance: Inherited Estates (22 Apr 2008)

Lord Turnbull: My Lords, the Minister will be aware that we face the greatest turmoil in financial markets in many decades and that many banks are being urged to increase their capital. Does he not therefore share my puzzlement—I am a director of a life insurance company with a large inherited estate—that insurance companies are being urged to do precisely the opposite; that is, to distribute...

Climate Change Bill [HL] (31 Mar 2008)

Lord Turnbull: My Lords, when an amendment to Clause 1 was debated on Report, the Minister was rather dismissive of it. He argued that it would weaken the Bill. We now have a new amendment, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, and the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. I shall make another attempt to persuade the Minister of its merits. First, the amendment has the merit of elegance and clarity in its...

Climate Change Bill [HL] (18 Mar 2008)

Lord Turnbull: My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Woolmer. We are talking about something that operates like a carbon tax at consumer level, a CAT rather than a VAT. If you are going to do that you have to integrate it into the rest of the tax system. The feature of VAT is that it is a cascade tax in which you net off all the tax you paid at previous stages. With this arrangement we have no safeguard,...

Climate Change Bill [HL] (11 Mar 2008)

Lord Turnbull: My Lords, I, too, welcome the fact that the noble Lord, Lord Stern, has joined our discussions. As well as reading his report, I commend to noble Lords his Ely lecture to the American Economic Association. The middle third is pretty difficult for people without a PhD in economics, but the first and final thirds make excellent reading. It also explains very clearly why the amendment passed in...

Climate Change Bill [HL] (4 Mar 2008)

Lord Turnbull: My Lords, the arguments against inclusion seem to confuse two completely different issues. The first is whether aviation and shipping should be included in the carbon account. The second is whether we are ready to include aviation and shipping in a system of penalties and incentives such as the ETS. Because the answer to the second is no, we say that we cannot include the emissions in the...