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North-East England: Socio-Economic Prospects

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Patten. He and I entered the other place together in 1979 and have been political opponents ever since, but I agreed very much with what he said. I also congratulate the noble Lord who initiated the debate and pay tribute to the very eloquent way in which he has very quickly become a strong advocate for his own region. He was a very good constituency MP, if I may say so, and also rather a good Government Whip, and I am delighted to see him appear on the Front Bench opposite from time to time. My own credentials for intervening in this debate are that I have been an acute observer of the north-east economy for at least 50 of my 72 years. I was born and educated in the region before I went away to the noble Lord’s university, Oxford. The whole of my extended family was scarred by the dreadful experiences of the 1920s and 1930s, and that has given me a passion against unemployment and for economic prosperity and the abolition of poverty, which lives with me still. I have been a practitioner in the realm of economic development in the north-east for almost 40 years, having headed up economic development at Tyne and Wear in 1974 and having been chairman of the North of England Development Council, the predecessor of the predecessor of One North East, in 1974. Of course, I have seen different Governments and different economic policies come and go. Some of them have been better for the region and some have been worse. From about 1994 onwards, I saw the continuous economic growth which went all the way through the Blair Government and, sadly, ended at about the time of the Northern Rock debacle, the credit crunch and the global crisis. During that long period, I saw the economy of the north-east utterly transformed, as were the riversides of Tyne and Wear and the Tees. The infrastructure was transformed too but, more importantly, we saw all five universities punching their weight in the economic development of the region. There is still some way to go but it is a very welcome development. We also saw the growth of entrepreneurship. Historically, following the glorious days of which the noble Lord spoke—of Swan, Armstrong and all the wonderful entrepreneurs of that generation—our region became far too wedded to large organisations and entrepreneurship fell by the wayside. It had grown extensively during the long period of economic growth, but it still has a long way to go. I have long been an advocate of SME development and micro-business development, and I criticise the many small business agencies of successive Governments which have talked the talk but very often have failed to walk the walk. They have not given local entrepreneurs the kind of advice that they have needed. They have been given all kinds of other advice, often from failed business people, but not the sort of timely advice that the entrepreneur needs. Therefore, that is something for the Government to look at again. However, the region has been transformed and I am enormously proud of the resurgence that it has experienced, symbolised by the Baltic, the Millennium Bridge and the Alnwick gardens, among many other things. It looks as though my time has quickly disappeared. I am pleased to have taken part in the debate, although I wish I could have spoken for a couple of hours more.