Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, this strikes me as a most deceptive announcement. The deceit lies in the fact that rather than being aimed at reducing the cost to consumers—as it proposes to be—the announcement is in truth aimed at appeasing, as we have heard, a Back-Bench Conservative lobby averse to what it regards as unsightly wind farms. The cost of offshore wind-generated electricity is reckoned to be...
Viscount Hanworth: What steps are the Government taking to sustain and enhance our competence in nuclear engineering, as indeed they have been encouraged to do in several recent reports?
Viscount Hanworth: Over the past quarter of a century there has been a continuing deterioration in Britain’s balance of payments. The current account, which represents the balance of trade in goods and services, has shown an ever widening deficit. The deficit on the current account in the three months to September 2014 reached a value that was equal to 6% of GDP. This is the biggest deficit that has been...
Viscount Hanworth: I wish to talk about the dangers of our current economic circumstances, which have been exacerbated over the past five years of a Conservative Administration. I believe that we are heading for a crisis that will impoverish the nation, and from which it will take a long time to recover. I should like to examine this situation in the context of competing economic theories. In the years...
Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, you can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time. If we take as our evidence his Budget speech of last Wednesday, this is a nostrum of democratic politics of which George Osborne seems to be in denial. Indeed, he seems to have forgotten it completely. The Conservative...
Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, we must congratulate the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, on a most interesting and engaging maiden speech, which conveyed some important and compelling evidence. His speech is a contribution to a debate on a most important issue in which, remarkably, three earls are speaking. The noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, trained and practised as a lawyer and has spent 25 years in the insurance...
Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, I had an opportunity earlier this afternoon to read the letter from the noble Lord, Lord Bates, to those who intended to participate in today’s Report stage. I express my appreciation of his consideration in writing, but I must observe that the fast-track schedule of the Bill is severely impeding its proper parliamentary scrutiny. The Government have not given themselves enough...
Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, my name is also attached to the amendments in this group and I strongly support the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Phillips. One of the most arresting testimonies that I have heard recently concerns the way in which the alienation and radicalisation of young British Muslims has been related to a rising tide of Islamophobia. It would be wrong to suggest that the existing Prevent...
Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, the finances of local government are an opaque matter. The sources of revenue and the categories of expenditure can be represented in various ways that can give widely differing and quite contrary impressions regarding the state of the finances and the severity of the financial restraints faced by local authorities. There is ample scope for bamboozlement by a Government who are...
Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, the Bill is a mixture of new initiatives and refinements of existing legislation. It is being fast-tracked through Parliament in a way that makes it very difficult to subject it to adequate scrutiny. The complicating factor is that much of the information that might enable parliamentarians to judge the likely effects of the powers to counter terrorism or the terrorist threat is...
Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, the quality of the provision in old people’s care homes varies widely. In the best of them, the residents are treated with respect and solicitude. In the worst of them, as we have witnessed recently, they are treated callously and brutally by underpaid and badly trained staff. The increasing longevity of our population is leading to a rising demand for the provision of care for...
Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, 75 years ago, Britain faced up to an evil that was threatening to dominate Europe. Now we are facing an evil of a similar dimension that is afflicting the Middle East. We are reluctant to face up to it, but we must do so. I am sure that, together with our allies, we will have the power to defeat this evil. If it becomes necessary or even advantageous to commit troops to the region,...
Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, I wish to question the Minister about the intentions that underlie the parts of the Infrastructure Bill that relate to our highways. However, at the outset, I will discuss the opinions of economists regarding the rules that should govern our access to highways. One of the first people to think systematically about the economics of highways was the 19th-century French engineer and...
Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, this year the Speech from the Throne has been a very dull affair; it is distinguished more by its omissions than by its inclusions. It has failed to address the urgent problems that have arisen from the previous enactments of the Government. The programme of privatisation and deregulation, which has been accompanied by the disengagement of the state from all manner of social...
Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, from my perspective this has been a distressing Budget. It has all of the features that we have come to expect of the activities and the enactments of the Chancellor. I wish to examine some of these features, albeit briefly. The Budget is highly political in the sense that it is dominated by the objective of gaining an electoral advantage for the Conservative Party, no matter what...
Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, I support the amendment of my noble friend Lord Whitty. The privatisation of the UK water industry occurred as long ago as the late 1980s, and it was accomplished in a fashion and manner that paid scant attention to the need for an attentive regulation of the industry. A provision for the public regulation of privatised industries was an integral part of the concept of privatisation...
Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, as I had occasion to remark at Second Reading, some water companies have been making exorbitant profits on the back of the rather generous tariffs that have been allowed by Ofwat. Whereas consumers were once able to disregard the cost of their water usage, it can now be a significant item in their budgets, to the extent that those in poverty may struggle to pay their bills. I have...
Viscount Hanworth: I thank the Minister for that explanation. She has told us that the market operator is intended to operate silently in the background but I am not sure that that justifies the complete silence of the documentation we have received about the market operator. This is a fundamental part of the architecture of the water industry as it is intended to evolve so the lack of any mention of it in the...
Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, I also thank the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, for his very helpful approach in informing some of us of the intricacies of the Bill. This is a probing amendment, designed to throw some light on the arrangements regarding the so-called market operator. An electronic search of the Bill fails to reveal a single instance of the words “market operator”. We have been alerted to the...
Viscount Hanworth: My Lords, small and medium-sized enterprises, SMEs, depend mainly on commercial banks to provide finance via loans, overdrafts and credit cards. According to the evidence from a National Audit Office report, lending to SMEs was negative in almost every month from June 2011 to August 2013, which is to say that, during the period, adequate finance was not forthcoming from the banks. We are told...
