Finance (No. 2) Bill — House of Lords, 2015-03-26
Topic: Education
Richard Newby (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): Given the policy of the noble Lord’s party on further education, and given that if you talk to anybody in a university about their absolute fears about what will happen if a Labour Government comes in, with their policies to cut grants, and their views on what that does to university funding, I would have thought that the best thing for the Labour Party to do for the future of universities is to pursue a policy of as much silence as it can manage. In this Parliament we have seen record numbers of young people going to university, including record numbers of girls and of young people from poorer backgrounds. That is exactly the sort of change and development that I thought the Labour Party supported. We have recognised that there is a need to improve skills below university level. As I was saying, we have supported the creation of university technology colleges and overseen the increase in the number of apprentices to 2 million, which is vastly more than obtained during the previous Government The noble Lord, Lord Soley, quite rightly talked about the absolute importance of science and technology and the transfer of basic research into business success. We have maintained resource funding and increased capital for science in real terms during the lifetime of this Parliament. Over the period ahead, we are planning some £5.9 billion of investment in the science infrastructure. On how we get that science applied, we have consistently put money into the catapults, the purpose of which is to act as a bridge between universities and firms. These have been extremely successful: the high-end engineering ones have been very successful. I saw the National Composites Centre in Bristol, which is doing tremendous work. It is possible to do that work only because it is a partnership between government, the universities and business. This concept began under the last Government, but we have strongly supported it. We need to do more, first, because it is successful and, secondly, because all our competitors are doing something like it Furthermore, in science we have initiated a grand challenge fund, which will deliver some £400 million of funding on a competitive basis for new, world-leading scientific infrastructure. Within the overall area of science and technology, we have put a £100 million investment, for example, into the research and development of intelligent mobility, which is one of the leading potential growth areas on which this country wishes to be, and remain, in the lead The noble Lord, Lord Desai, reminded us that the Labour Party legislated to halve the deficit over a four-year period, which is almost precisely what has happened under this Government. On his radical plans for changing the basis of corporate taxes and taxation more generally, this Government increased indirect taxation on consumption by increasing VAT and they have reduced taxation on income by putting up the personal allowance. Clearly that process, at least as far as indirect taxation is concerned, will not be pursued by any party in the next Government, as we heard yesterday On the noble Lord’s more radical ideas on taxing consumption, I am not a tax radical, I am afraid, partly because I started my working life as a tax man. I think that grand taxation schemes often have a whole raft of unanticipated consequences. Of course, those who suffer from any tax change make about 100 times as much noise as those who benefit, so politically I wish the noble Lord luck with the sort of grand scheme that he has in mind, but I hope that I am never called upon to try to do something equally ambitious The noble Lord, Lord Soley, made a number of interesting and useful points. I am pleased that he welcomed the changes to gift aid, and I wish him well in finishing the funding for the Mary Seacole statue. Having been in charge of fundraising for the Lloyd George statue in Parliament Square, I know just how stressful the process is, and I hope very much that it is quickly brought to a successful conclusion I will pass back to my colleagues in the Treasury and the Department for Transport the point that the noble Lord made about subsidising the establishment of charging points for electric vehicles. I have considerable sympathy with what he said about the power of attorney. I have power of attorney for my mother, and trying to work out how to exercise it is really quite difficult. Having gone through the whole process, I found that it was remarkably anachronistic. As we are moving into a period where power of attorney will be required by more and more families, there is an argument for looking a bit more fundamentally at the whole thing and not just at the way in which it can be used once it has been granted.