Lord Sassoon (Con)

My Lords, I was not going to speak to this amendment, but I believe that my noble friends Lady Harding of Winscombe, Lord Pickles and Lord Harper have misunderstood—I would not say misrepresented—what the amendment is all about. I declare my interests in coming from a family in which my mother’s German Jewish family lost members in the Holocaust, and in which my great uncle, who came to this country, founded the Jewish Refugees Committee, which organised the Kindertransport. I also speak as a former Treasury Minister; that is how I look at the numbers and what the amendment seeks to do. As I understand it and read it, my noble friend Lords Eccles is as concerned as I am and many others are that we have had no up-to-date or credible figures from the Minister, throughout the various stages of the Bill, as to what the current costs are. The latest costs, I think, go back at least two years, and we have heard what has happened to the costs since then. As a House, we need to understand what the more recent estimates are. As I read it, this amendment puts a cap on the public contribution to this, but does not, as my noble friends have just said, or implied, cap the total cost of the project—if my noble friend tells me I have got it wrong, I will sit down. Speaking as a former Treasury official and Minister, I say that we need a bit of discipline on this project. It is not going to cap the total cost of the project and, unless the Minister is able to give us more credible figures to explain the latest thinking about the split between the private and public sector contributions, I would be fully supportive of my noble friend Lord Eccles’s amendment, because it puts some necessary financial discipline on the project but will in no way—as my noble friends have said, and they can come back at me if they want to—cap the total expenditure that could be incurred on the project.