Lord Bridges of Headley (Con)

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for an excellent debate and their fantastic speeches. The debate has shown this House at its very best and shown why our committee is able to produce such hard-hitting reports. I thank all noble Lords for their very kind words about me, which were entirely unwarranted—I have had enough compliments to last me for several years. From this debate, it is clear that it is utterly unavoidable that we are living in a world of extreme change and high volatility, that is becoming more dangerous by the day. That said, what has not changed—a number of noble Lords made this point—are the enormous trends and challenges we face, the Ds: debt, demographics, decarbonisation, dependency and defence. All these challenges were in the report. They are extreme challenges. As my noble friends Lord Forsyth and Lord Lamont, and the noble Lord, Lord Razzall, said, these are challenges that merit much more debate than two hours on a Friday morning. Our approach to them raises enormous questions: ones that fall into the immediate category—those about policy and process—as well as far more fundamental questions of philosophy and belief. Let me briefly touch on what we have covered this morning. On the policies and the processes, as a number of noble Lords said, we face a dire problem with growth and productivity. As my noble friend Lord Forsyth quite rightly said, the responsibility of that falls on this side of the House as much as on anyone else, but we must confront and grapple with these challenges. Noble Lords spoke about investment in infrastructure. The noble Lord, Lord Horam, spoke about the problems of energy. The noble Lord, Lord Weir, spoke about planning. My noble friend Lord Moynihan of Chelsea spoke about the crushing tax burden and our whole tax system. The noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, spoke about trade. Each one of those is a massive issue. Then there is the fiscal rule, which, as the noble Lord, Lord King, so rightly said, is Augustinian in nature. Another enormous issue is about how we tackle and treat the concept of borrowing for investment—and today noble Lords could see the kind of debate we have in the Economic Affairs Committee between the noble Baronesses, Lady Wolf and Lady Kramer, and the noble Lord, Lord Davies. There is the question of whether our entire fixation on fiscal rules is overwhelming us and whether we should actually look at the substance of fiscal policy, as my noble friend Lady Noakes and the noble Lords, Lord Macpherson and Lord Burns, said. Of course, an entirely new approach could have taken: the debt break approach of the Germans and the Swiss, to which the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, pointed. That leads us on to the role of the OBR. Are we assigning too much importance to the OBR and has it grown too big for its boots?