Lord Lilley (Con)

My Lords, it is a great privilege and pleasure to follow and pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Mackinlay of Richborough. His was an outstanding maiden speech from an outstanding new Member of this House—robust, inspiring, informative, energetic and with a touch of provocation, which he uncharacteristically toned down. My noble friend Lord Mackinlay is a friend whom I knew before his illness to be as courageous intellectually as he proved to be physically. He is a fighter and a winner, and, mercifully, his lovely wife Kati is also a fighter. We are grateful to her for ensuring that my noble friend is with us today. He entered the Commons in 2015 for South Thanet in a forcefully fought general election, when both Nigel Farage and the comedian Al Murray had the temerity to stand against him. I am glad to say that he saw both jokers off and had the last laugh. As I rapidly discovered when I got to know him after he entered the House in my last Parliament as an MP, he is refreshingly different from so many of the new intake. He is not just a spad and a PPE graduate, like so many of them; he has a science degree and an accountancy qualification. So he takes into account facts and figures, which is terribly refreshing in Parliament. Noble Lords will find that they have to contend with his facts and figures in debates to come. My noble friend told me that his mother gave him a piece of advice early on in life: above all, to your own self be true. That he always has been, and it is perhaps one reason, he says, why he did not become a Minister in the House of Commons: he was quite prepared to back up his beliefs with his vote, and clearly the Whips did not think he would cease to do so if they tried to buy him off. But he had more influence in the House of Commons than many who did have a period on the Front Bench, as most of them did during the rapid turnover in the last Parliament. This influence was not least through the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, which I have the privilege to belong to, as well as the Common Sense Group and the European Research Group, in all of which he was an influential person. We look forward with enthusiasm to hearing his combative and well-informed contributions to this House in the years ahead. I also pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Beckett. She, like me, was President of the Board of Trade, and we presidents must stick together. Probably not all presidents would meet her approval currently, but I have always admired her contribution in the House of Commons over an enormous period of time. I want to welcome this Bill, which is essentially a prospectus—an incredibly attractive investment opportunity. I use the word “incredibly” advisedly. It is backed by 22 of the most prominent people in this country—members of the Cabinet. True, none of them has ever launched a company before. Indeed, none of them has ever worked in the private sector. But that perhaps gives them a clarity of view which enables them to see investment prospects that have escaped the attention of commercial businesses up and down the country. The principal promoter of the Bill is of course the Secretary of State, Ed Miliband. It can be said that no company he has been involved with has ever failed—because he has never been involved with any company. He will have the power to issue directions to the board about anything. There is no limitation in the Bill on what he can direct them to do or not to do. He has said, however, that he will use that power sparingly—which will be a disappointment to the board: only rarely will it have his superior wisdom to guide it on the true path. We are asked to endorse this prospectus before the priorities and strategy of the new company have been published: they will be in due course, but they have not been yet. Investors may be concerned that the Government are putting up costs in the sector in which all the investments are to be made but are saying the prices are going to come down by some £300 per family. Investors might think, “Well, how on earth is it going to make a profit, with rising costs and falling prices?”. But do not worry, the Government have abandoned their promise to cut prices by £300 per family and have rejected all amendments in the other place which would have made that part of the duties of the company, as promised by the Labour Party at the last election. Anyway, as a nationalised company, it will clearly bring the cost control of HS2 and the profit-making capacity of the Post Office to the businesses in which it invests. That must give us all great confidence for the future. I do not see noble Lords reaching for their chequebooks to invest in this—although clearly the noble Baronesses, Lady Winterton and Lady Hayman, will be, as indeed will the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer. They have all welcomed it and they will be putting in their money in—or they would if they could. Sadly, the Government have concluded that they might not be able to attract equity investors into this rather strange company that will not tell us quite what its priorities and strategies are going to be. I think the only previous company that was ever successfully launched like that was the South Sea bubble company, which said in its prospectus that its purposes would be revealed “at a later date”. And it went on to have initial great success—before the bubble burst. Setting irony aside, this Government have said that, even though they do not expect to be able to attract investors to put their own money into the company, they are going to take £8.3 billion out of the pockets of taxpayers and put it in. But, more than that, they say it is going to crowd in investment several times that amount into the sector. Will it do so? Yes, it will. I am not being ironic here. It will succeed in attracting other companies to invest alongside it, because other companies will know that, if they invest in projects in which Great British Energy has invested taxpayers’ money, the politicians are not going to let those projects fail. That is why they will be attractive to the private sector: because they know the Government will always come and bail them out, because of the embarrassment of failure. That is why—and the only reason why—a nationalised company such as this can crowd in investment from outside. I think we should all realise that that is the case. It is significant that the Minister, who spoke with great clarity and little conviction about this Bill, did not give any example of any similar nationalised concern that has ever met the expectations that have been raised for it as they have been raised for this. We know that doing the same thing again and expecting a different outcome is supposedly Einstein’s definition of madness. I suspect that is what we are being asked to vote for today.