Lord Porter of Spalding (Con)

My Lords, I apologise if it is inappropriate to speak now, when I have not paid any attention to this debate previously—there is a good reason for that, which I will explain in a minute. I declare my interests as they pertain to this: there are a number, but the two main ones are that I am a vice-president of the LGA, so clearly I agree with some of what my noble friend Lord Fuller said, and I am also a non-executive director of a care company owned by another council. I could have spoken in a number of these debates, but I have chosen to speak now only because my noble friend Lord Fuller was speaking, and somebody has to put what he said in loads of words into a few short words. That is no disrespect to my noble friend, who is obviously much more eloquent than I will ever be. I have not spoken before because I do not agree with my side on everything. I do not think it is the Ministers’ fault, or my colleagues’ fault when they were Ministers, or the coalition’s fault when they were Ministers. All the pressures facing public services have been in the system for at least 20 years. In 2006, before the 2008 crash, we had a declining budget for public services; all the political parties have fingerprints on that. I do not want to get involved in the debate about whose fault it is, why we are here and how we got this far. I really love civil servants—I was a NED in a department for a while—but it is their fault that the Government are now doing the wrong thing. The Government have created a jobs tax that will increase unemployment because it was an easy model that has been sitting on the shelf for the best part of 15 or 16 years. Other Governments resisted going down this route; the current Government have been caught on the hop and are acting against their own stated aims. I really do not want to criticise the Government or the Civil Service, but if we are to have more money to spend on public services, which everybody agrees are underfunded, we have to get it from somewhere, so somebody is going to pay more. Hopefully, we will all make more, so we can all afford to pay more, but this will not give us more. It will end up giving us less, because people will be laid off and we will have to pay their benefits. We will get worse public services and more expensive benefits—nobody wins, but it is an easy solution to a big problem. So, while I agree that we are going to play Committee games and not move any of these amendments, at some point we will end up going through a Division Lobby and we will vote against the Government—not because we do not like them, but because we think they are being sucker-punched by people who have an easy solution that will not fix the problem. This is a hard problem; we have to find the proper solution to it, and NI is not the way to get better public services. For those reasons, I have to agree with my friend John—my noble friend Lord Fuller—but I cannot speak as eloquently as he can.