Lord Howard of Rising (Con)

As my noble friend says, you get a knighthood—possibly even a barony. If you get something wrong, throw more money at it until it becomes an embarrassment that can no longer be hidden and hushed up. HS2’s original budget was £37.5 billion. Only when the estimated cost has risen to £90 billion—and counting—is the project being reined in. The idea of spending £100 million on a bat shelter defies the imagination. I mean: who could have thought of that one? As economists are being quoted, might I quote Professor Milton Friedman? He said: “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand”. What the Government should do is what anybody in this Room, faced with the same problem in their own life—too much spending and not enough income—would do: cut spending to solve the problem. Given that that is unlikely to happen, will His Majesty’s Government carefully consider what they are doing and try to reduce some of the negative consequences of this increase in national insurance for employers? A sensible first step would be to prepare a proper impact assessment for those small companies, often described as the engine of the economy.