Contribution
My Lords, it is a pleasure to take part in this debate. I add to the congratulations to my noble friend Lord Bridges, as chairman of the committee, and its members for producing this—I was going to say “timely” report, but this debate is some seven months after the report was published and quite a lot has changed in that time.
Short of national security, it addresses the biggest issue facing the country. That we have an advisory speaking time of four minutes tells you everything about the way in which Parliament is increasingly becoming the decorative part of the constitution. We now, apparently, take on huge, unlimited, unknown debt in nationalising industries over a weekend and give powers to civil servants to force people in private companies to do things on pain of being sent to prison if they do not—and Parliament has no say. It is clearly important that we address this issue not just in Parliament but in the country.
The lesson of this report is that our people—the constituents of the Members at the other end of this building, our families—have no idea of the crisis that is facing our country and the threat that it presents to our ability to deliver pensions and important public services.
Even this week we learn that borrowing has turned out to be £15 billion more than expected. In the year to March, as the noble Lord, Lord Londesborough, said, we spent £151.9 billion more than we had in income, and we are relying on growth, which we have not seen since 2008, to rescue us from that situation. As the report points out, there are fundamental strategic reasons why we need to tackle this now, and the longer we wait to bite the bullet the bigger the problem will be.
These reasons include the fact that, in the 1980s, we thought we had a peace dividend, but now we realise that we should not have spent that money, but we had committed that expenditure to welfare and other matters. The baby boomers were creating wealth and now they, like me, are a burden on the state in one form or another. The notion that we can finance the triple lock on pensions, however popular it may be, is ridiculous in these circumstances. We need to get the country to understand that and to lower its expectations for the future.
We had growth in world trade. Now we have an—I hesitate to use an adjective—Administration in the United States who are determined to destroy world trade. I assume that we should forgive them, for they know not what they do, but the impact on growth will be enormous. As my noble friend Lord Bridges pointed out, life expectancy is increasing; this and the success of the National Health Service point to further pressures that will be difficult to sustain.
Whenever there is a consensus on anything, one ought to worry. There was a consensus on quantitative easing and on lockdown, and now we are paying the price for that quantitative easing—for printing money on a vast scale. It has left the country more vulnerable to rises in interest rates and more dependent on the kindness of strangers and foreign investors, at a time when the world as a whole is under severe pressure. The latest estimate is that QE will cost us some £150 billion. The decline in the workforce to support all of this is such that, by 2070, there will be one person in work for every person in retirement. That is a huge burden to place on the next generation.
Therefore, this report should be taken seriously by the Government and by the Opposition. We need a consensus in our country, to explain to our people the crisis that we are facing, in the context of the world crisis, and to cut our cloth according to our ability to pay.