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Please find the audio recording from my lecture on Sustainable Economic Growth, Public and Private Partnerships delivered to students at Reading University, Henley Business School.

It begins at 3:47.

Please find below my GB News interview with Jacob Rees Mogg where we discuss the International Monetary Fund’s inaccurate economic forecasts, the Bank of England’s policies and expanding capacity.

My Interview is between 6:43-13:26

This week when we finally hear how many people came to UK over the last year we are warned the figure could be considerably higher than the 504,000 additional people when we saw the last annual figure. Some are saying it could rise as high as a million. Others think around 750,000, still well up on the previous high figure. In 2019 the Conservative Manifesto promised to take it down below a figure of under 250,000 which it was running at.

These figures are net. Numbers of people entering the UK has been running above 1 million, with leavers offsetting some arrivals. The incoming migrants are more likely to need subsidised housing, income top up and school places for children whilst those leaving are often older richer people with a home of their own.

I have long opposed the cheap labour model of inviting in many to do low paid jobs. What is cheap for the employer is dear for the taxpayer. Providing a home, school places, NHS capacity, utilities and public services is expensive. The City of Southampton has 250,000 people. If we invite in an extra 500,000 people we need to build two new Southamptons a year to house and service them. We are not building anything like that. No wonder we are so short of houses and no wonder they are so dear.

The EU used to say the set up costs for a migrant were 250,000 Euro to build a home and provide state services. It will be more now. If we took that low field figure of £250,000  that would mean the state spending £125 bn a year to provide capital for 500,000 low paid migrants. It makes the Treasury enthusiasm for more migrants to fill low paid jobs difficult to understand. The OBR model which likes more migrants to boost GDP needs to be recast to be more interested in GDP or national income per head. More low paid jobs do not help that.Migrants also need private sector shops, leisure facilities and the rest.

The Home Secretary wishes to reduce legal migration. The  Chancellor should help her instead of thinking it is good for numbers. In his own terms it is bad, adding to pressure on deficits and state spending and helping fuel shortages which are inflationary.There are many sensible ways to cut legal migration starting with an increase in the pay you need to earn to take a job here with a permit.

Some regulars to this site and a few of my constituents are raising the issue of excess deaths. Over the last year according to official statistics these have been higher than normal. Some want to know if the covid vaccines have anything to do with this. The NHS medical establishment makes clear they do not think so and continue to recommend the vaccines as safe.

The latest excess death figures show above normal levels of death from cardiovascular causes, and sharply higher from liver disease. The overall excess death numbers are well below the covid peak prior to general vaccination.

It would be helpful if the NHS could provide a medical explanation of the trend in excess deaths over the last year, with any recommendations they might have to bring it back down. Meanwhile others without medical training will speculate, with worries about delays and missing treatments amongst the issues they raise.

Department for Energy Security and Net Zero provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (184255):

Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, if he will make an assessment of the potential impact of his Department’s policies on improving the environmental performance of rented homes on levels of rental payments. (184255)

Tabled on: 10 May 2023

Answer:
Graham Stuart:

Alongside the consultation on improving the energy performance of privately rented homes, the Government has published an impact assessment, which includes an assessment of the potential impact on rental payments. The Government is refining the policy design to ensure the costs, circumstances, and potential impacts relating to energy efficiency improvements are fair and proportionate for landlords and tenants. The Government will publish a summary of consultation responses by the end of this year and will publish an updated impact assessment once the final policy decisions are made.

The answer was submitted on 18 May 2023 at 16:37.

Department for Energy Security and Net Zero provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (184257):

Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, if he will make an estimate of the proportion of the cost of manufacturing new wind turbines for use in the UK that has been incurred in factories based in the UK in the last three years. (184257)

Tabled on: 10 May 2023

Answer:
Graham Stuart:

The Department does not hold this data.

The answer was submitted on 18 May 2023 at 16:40.

Department for Energy Security and Net Zero provided the following answer to your written parliamentary question (184253):

Question:
To ask the Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero, if his Department has made an estimate of the take up rate for heat pumps in existing dwellings up to 2030. (184253)

Tabled on: 10 May 2023

Answer:
Graham Stuart:

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero estimates that current and proposed policies could support total retrofit heat pump uptake of around 60,000 in FY24/25, 90,000 in FY25/26, 150,000 in FY26/27, 250,000 in FY27/28, 400,000 in FY28/29 and between 500,000 – 700,000 in 2030.

The answer was submitted on 18 May 2023 at 16:38.

The government takes its net zero ambitions seriously . It  is embarking on a trial village scheme to see if we could all heat our homes with hydrogen. Many people would prefer to keep their current boilers and pipes and switch to hydrogen when it is safe and affordable to do so. Heat pumps are a hard sell with doubts expressed about the costs of  installing them, the costs of running them and the adequacy of the heat in older homes. The government  have various issues to trial around hydrogen  safety, leaks and affordability.  When would the cost of it come down? Will it  become competitive with current natural gas charges?  Is it a priority to introduce it into homes, or to develop it for powering trucks and heavy plant where batteries are more difficult?

The truth is the green revolution cannot take off until there are products and services people want to buy and can afford that will take natural gas and solid fuel heating out of homes and replace diesel and petrol vehicles. For this reason government has concentrated more on getting the electricity industry to make a major change to how it generates its power first, and has instructed business to put themselves on a faster joruney to net zero than individuals and families. There is no point in making people go electric if  generation is not green.  The danger is in doing so the government intervenes too much in our energy  system, raising costs and charges and damaging national resilience and supply. It is not a green win if the UK replaces domestically produced gas with imported LNG, as that produces far more CO2 in its compression, transport and conversion than using our own gas from a North Sea field by pipe. Nor is it a world win if we make energy too expensive here driving steel, ceramics and other energy industries out of the country. We will then have the additional CO2 for transporting the imports as well as losing the jobs and tax revenue.

In its latest Energy Bill the government proposes making an additional tax charge on energy users to cover the costs of some of the development work on hydrogen. This is the latest in a series of extra taxes on energy. We have very  high carbon taxes through an emissions trading scheme which the UK has made severe. There are windfall taxes on energy profits. The rate of general business profits tax has been raised by 31% this year. The costs of getting permits and complying with all of the requirements if you still want to put in a power station, drill for gas or build a wind farm have also gone up, whilst the electricity grid is not large enough for the extra renewables wanting to use it. The main energy policy seems to be to get investors to put in  more pipes and cables to the continent so we can import more, especially when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining and we are short of power. This model results in yet dearer energy as we have to bid into a European  market that is often short of power itself.

There has to be some end to this policy of ever more taxes and  interventions. Some  industries in the UK are not competitive today because of our energy costs. Government then has to boost public spending by granting sbsidies to industries that cannot survive with current energy prices, giving back some of the taxes it has imposed. This is a self destroying money go round, where not imposing the tax in the first place would be a better answer.

‘The great western inflation should lead to changes at the Central Banks’

Rt Hon Sir John Redwood will be giving a lecture on the great western inflation of the last two years. He will examine the role of the Central banks, explain how they could have avoided the general price rises, and ask how the Bank of Japan, the Swiss Central Bank and the People’s Bank of China kept inflation down. He will point out that contrary to common accounts the Fed and the Bank of England are not independent but work closely with Treasury officials and the wider government they serve. He will make recommendations for changes to the models and approach the three main western Central banks use. He will cover the question of how Quantitative easing and Quantitative tightening have added to the problems and blurred dividing lines between Central Bank and government financial and budget policies.

John Redwood has written and spoken on economic topics for many years. He warned against the destabilising effects of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism on the UK economy in the 1980s, warned about excessive credit and lending in the mid-2000s prior to the banking crash and argued against Quantitative easing extending into 2021 and 2022 when recovery was well set after recognising its need in 2020 to offset lockdowns.

The event has been published on the University website: https://www.ox.ac.uk/event/great-western-inflation-should-lead-changes-central-banks

And also, on the College’s website: https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/event/great-western-inflation-sir-john-redwood

Both links include a link to the registration form, which you can access directly by clicking here: https://forms.office.com/e/sWmVQEZdkV