---

Fiscal Responsibility Bill

Noble Lords would not expect me to come to Parliament on the basis of number work that I had done on my own. They would be suspicious that I had started with the answer I sought and that I had done the arithmetic to arrive at that answer. The information that I gave was of course based on IMF statistics and projections. The noble Lord, Lord Northbrook, also mentioned Mr Willem Buiter, who is now an economist with Citibank. The noble Lord regularly mentions Mr Michael Saunders, although it looks as though he is going to have to patronise some other banks in addition to Citibank for his sources of information. I think that we have already set out that Mr Willem Buiter—I almost referred to him as ““the noble Lord”” but perhaps he will become a noble Lord in due course—is mistaken in some of his thinking about international practice. I am not going to be drawn into how we justify expenditure on care at home, the legislation for which is currently going through Parliament. However, I can say that we regard it as a priority and as worth while. All those who benefit will appreciate the Government’s commitment to helping those who need care at home and will have the comfort of being in their homes. They will also note that the Conservative Party is very opposed to that. In closing, I want to come back to the point that I was proposing to make to the noble Baroness. I continue to wrestle with the exact positioning of current Conservative fiscal thinking. Certainly, at the time of the Manchester party conference we were being prepared for an age of austerity. That then changed, with the Conservatives saying, ““We don’t have to do very much and we shouldn’t move too soon. We might just make a start””, but then last week the noble Baroness told us that we should prepare ourselves for an age of austerity. I also heard her say that she could not possibly be precise about where cuts would be made because she had to wait until they had seen the books. However, Members of the Opposition are perfectly able to submit Written Questions or freedom of information inquiries to find out what they need to see in the books. Speaking as someone who has come relatively late in life to this job, I have to say that one does not discover many things in the books that are not already in the public domain, and some of them do not get into the public domain through the official channels. I suggest to the noble Baroness that she should not hold back from sharing her thinking with the House. As one of her colleagues said—it may have been the noble Lord, Lord Northbrook—the IFS is suggesting that cuts for non-protected programmes will need to be in the region of 20 per cent or so. Of course, the Conservative Party has said that it is going to go further and faster. I should like the noble Baroness to tell us whether that is true. Is the Conservative Party committed to an early cut in public expenditure on the scale of cutting one-fifth of all public expenditure? It is a very simple question. In this House I have always tried to give straightforward answers to questions. If I have not been able to do so, I hope that I have been punctilious in writing to Peers with explanations and answers to their questions. Therefore, I put a very simple question to the noble Baroness: is the Conservative Party so committed? I know that she might need briefing—indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Northbrook, was briefing her just now and I am sure she was very grateful for his contribution—because last week she was very wobbly in answering a question from the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, on whether the Conservative Party would never join the euro. I think that that is where she started off in her reply. She then backed off from that position and qualified it a little, saying that she had always been told never to use the word ““never””. However, Mr Cameron is now saying that if he is Prime Minister we will never join the euro. Perhaps she could clarify that point as well. What else can I say? I think that I have covered just about everything. The noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, has given me the Google index of credibility. He says that the number of hits on the Code for Fiscal Stability suggests that not many people are reading it. That is probably evidence of the fact that they think it is so universally wise, profoundly significant and important that they do not need to read it, but I shall be using the Google index of credibility to establish how credible Conservative Party policies are in a number of areas. The noble Lord, Lord Ryder of Wensum, talked about a gilt strike. I am afraid that that is absolute nonsense. In fact, we have just had another auction, which was excellently covered, and gilts continue to be funded at less than 4 per cent over a 10-year maturity. That is extremely attractive by comparison with the past. Certainly when the noble Lord was himself a Minister, such funding was taking place in the mid-teens, and I can see no evidence of a gilt strike. The noble Lord also referred to a Buster Keaton film, suggesting that ““The Railroader”” was appropriate. With this important piece of legislation, I should prefer to say that the Buster Keaton film to which I would look is ““The Navigator””. Once again, our inspired leader, the right honourable Gordon Brown, is navigating us through troubled waters on a path to fiscal sustainability, consolidation, safe and secure national financing, and prosperity for ever more.