To the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, I am in complete disagreement that we need to change the method of election to the House of Commons. He is right that the single-member constituency and the constituency link is fundamental. I remember when I went to Brussels all too often as a negotiating Minister, and met Ministers there chosen or elected by other means, that one of the big gaps between us was that I was constantly saying that a new law could not make any sense for my constituents I was meeting tomorrow in my surgery. Their response was, “Well, why do you bother?” They did not have to, because they did not have that single constituency link.

It is also easiest and fairest to say that the person with the most votes wins. As soon as you become the Member of Parliament, you have to represent everybody to the best of your ability, and you need support from your constituents. So, it makes sense to give the job to the person who already commands the most votes of the group who came forward in election, and it is obviously much easier if you win more than half the votes, as I often had the good fortune to do when I was a Member of Parliament. You need to build support and represent people, so the single-member constituency is the least bad way of electing the House of Commons.

The Liberal Democrats would be wise to remember that when they were in the coalition Government, one of the things they insisted on—and Conservatives agreed to—was, on their choice of system, to have a referendum on whether we should change the voting system. From memory, the public voted 68% against, in favour of keeping the current system—more than two-thirds. I was and am still with the public on that. They were right. I have always found the “democracy” bit in the Lib Dem name a bit odd, because whenever we have a public vote, they always seem to disagree with it, then they want to overturn it, not listening to the views of the people. They do not like the verdict that was given on their preferred system of changing the voting system, and they do not like the outcome of the Brexit vote, when millions came out to say we needed to restore our sovereignty, so that we could have a debate like this to discuss how the powers of self-government should be administered and distributed.

The Liberal Democrats wish that to be taken away from us to a much higher level of government by agreement between parties around a council table, with only the Commission allowed to write the laws and make most of the suggestions. The Lib Dems need to think very carefully about how they see democracy, compared with the way the rest of us see democracy—because we think democracy is about the voice of the people. There is only one thing above the elected House of Commons: the voice of the people in a referendum. The House of Commons would be wise to accept the verdict of a referendum, because otherwise, the people in the House of Commons can be changed at a subsequent general election.

As a former local government Minister, and, as a young man, a county councillor who chaired a committee and was therefore responsible for the conduct of various departments in the county council, I have a great affection for local government. Over my years as a Member of Parliament, I worked very closely with leading councillors in my area, and quite often, the issues that most concerned my constituents were wholly or partially decided by the local council.

What that taught me was that it is very disappointing that turnouts in local government elections are so low and that we do not get a good public debate through local media, and even social media, about the powers, duties and money that the council dispenses . If people knew more about what could be done by local government, I think there would be more interest in voting.

However, I am afraid that a lot of Labour and Liberal Democrat councils, as well as councils under no control, put people off. Instead of being proud of their powers and telling people how they will spend their money, all we ever hear from these councils is that they do not have enough money and they do not have any power because everything is already decided by the national Government. People therefore naturally conclude that there is no point in wasting their time with these councillors and councils, because the councillors themselves say, “Well don’t blame me, we can’t do anything; it’s already sorted out by the national Government”.

That of course is not true, but one of the further reasons why people are confused or put off is that we have far too many layers of government and council. It is a huge mistake to introduce regional strategic government in a small, very unified country such as England, and to have that in conflict with what should be truly local government through the local councils. My area moved over from county and district to unitary; I broadly welcomed that, because it removed some of the confusion. It means that, for local matters, we can say, “O unitary authority, it is your problem”, instead of being told that some row is going on between the county and the district and that nobody was really to blame.

That still leaves us with quite a lot of government, although I am very pleased that we have knocked out the European level, because that was a mighty imposition of taxes and laws that we often did not want. I am also glad that we have gone to unitaries, but we still have parish government, and now this Government are trying to intrude regional government on us. It is muddle, confusion and extra cost.

Let us deal with the question about the money. We always hear that most councils do not have enough money, and yet every year the council tax goes up, usually by more than inflation. That is what the public see. Every year government grants go up—yes, under Conservative Governments, as well as Labour Governments, grants usually go up—and councils still say that they are poor. Then when you look at how they are misspending, you can see why: councils that went on a binge buying up commercial property because the debt was cheap, or, as in my local area, a Lib Dem council wasting money on road projects and destroying our road systems for something that people do not want. The answer rests with local government using  its powers and spending its money more wisely. ( Time limit kicked in )

My Lords, I find these instruments very worrying, because they seem to be part of a pattern that the nationalised British Steel will not be properly accountable and will not provide decent information for the taxpayers’ representatives now funding the operation. We all wish every success in saving jobs and maintaining the basic steel-making capacity in this country, but I fear that this vehicle is not going about it in the right way.

We are not learning about what we are actually buying for the huge sums of money that are currently being put into it, with no proper budget line and no proper business plan to explain the expenditure. We learn in the scrutiny committee’s report that, in the first year or so, it was £555 million, so it is eating into the budget line for investment support in new steel-making activities. I think this is  how it is being funded by the Treasury—when presumably all or most of that has nothing to do with capital spending but has everything to do with operating losses. Much of it is based around the non-competitiveness of UK energy prices and the phenomenal cost of burning fossil fuels in blast furnaces with carbon taxes and the other net-zero impedimenta. These  are gradually deindustrialising very large areas of British activity, and would have deindustrialised us completely from basic steel-making if the Government had not stepped in, in this rather clumsy way, to route very large subsidies into a business that cannot conceivably compete at its current cost levels.

It would be timely if the Minister could update this Committee, and therefore the wider Parliament, on where we are getting to on the losses to date, as the last figures relate to the summer and the monthly losses were obviously very considerable since then. Is there any sign of the monthly losses coming down at all, or are we to assume that it will be £500 million or so a year every year?

It would be very good if the Minister could tell us what the plans are for these two blast furnaces. They are extremely old. I do not know whether they are both steel-producing or what maintenance schedule they have to be on, but, at some point, they will obviously need fundamental maintenance. Will that be put into the budget plans? Alternatively, will the nationalised industry carry on with the plans that the previous Government—and, I think, this Government at the beginning—were trying to negotiate with the Chinese owners. It was a case of switching over from blast furnace-basic steel-making to an electric arc furnace arrangement for recycled steel. That would clearly come with the loss of a lot of jobs, because they are far less job intensive, and would mean the termination of our country’s ability to make primary steel in the traditional way. Sometimes, you need primary steel to provide the additives and special steels that are more difficult to produce from recycled steel. Therefore, Parliament deserves to know more about the long-term plans.

Capital expenditure for an electric arc furnace would be very considerable and would need to have its own budget line, but it would be a more legitimate drawdown of the monies in the current overall budget for steel modernisation, out of which this seems to be funded. The Government wish to drop the idea of quarterly reporting of the financial figures. If a business in the private sector were losing this much money, quarterly reporting would be a bare minimum—you would want it to be monthly. The executives would want weekly reporting because this is a terrifying rate of loss, which implies that it is unsustainable. I would have thought the unions and workforce would be very interested as well, because I cannot see how the current operation represents a way of saving these jobs. At some point, there will be a crisis because of the lack of competitiveness and the very high level of cash burn, which would force the Government into a change of mind.

I am concerned at the wide-ranging and sweeping legal powers that the second statutory instrument wishes to take. There would be many companies trading in the private sector that would love to have friends at court who could suddenly suspend or remove all kinds of legal obligations upon them. Rightly, the Government will probably not do that, so why do they think it is reasonable to suspend important legal obligations on a company because it happens to be nationalised? The idea that you should not consult over TUPE when transferring people’s jobs seems particularly strange, because I would have thought that many employees in the union there would have welcomed the nationalisation. Why do they have to be told that they no longer have the normal rights to consultation on what could be quite important changes to the contracts they are operating under?

More worrying still is the idea that no senior official—doing this as a day job and liaising carefully with the board and the company—and no Minister designing the steel policy should be deemed to be a shadow director. Surely, they would be able to influence, to control or to order the company, because he or she who controls the money controls the business. This business really only has one important customer, which is the British Government, who are supplying these monumental sums of cash to keep the jobs going and to keep the blast furnaces operating, if possible.

Of course, Ministers and senior officials are, in practice, making crucial decisions that will dominate board discussions. If they are determined to suspend company law in relation to those activities, because they are Ministers and senior officials, there should be even more of an obligation on them to come regularly to the Commons and Lords to report on the progress they have been making. We need to apply the kind of scrutiny to them that would otherwise have been applied by company law and in normal board discussions by directors who genuinely have the power to determine the future of their company. The directors who the Government appoint will not determine the future of this company; the big decisions will be taken by the Government. Its very future is entirely dependent on the Government continuing to put very large sums of money into it.

We should also ask why the Freedom of Information Act will not apply. Again, it leads to suspicion that the Government think the results, performance and plans of this company will be so bad that they should not be revealed to the taxpaying public who pay for them. I would be a little more reassured if, in return for taking this big power—removing freedom of information inquiries from this expenditure of money in this very important company—we were told that there would be more regular and frank reporting through Parliament and directly to the public by normal company information. We could then be reassured that the Government are not trying to avoid all kinds of accountability.

It would be good to know from the Minister when the finances of this group will be regularised with a normal budget line, which we can see in the Red Book and Budget Statements. I do not think that they can go on for much longer saying this is just part of a general steel package designed for something else. We need an honest line in the Budgets so that we can see that it is being properly financed and is part of the Budget settlement.

It would also be good to hear something about the cost of energy, because this is a major reason why the losses are so huge. Will they be benefiting from the recycling of government money? The Government take money off businesses through carbon taxes and then give some of it back through the so-called supercharger that we have heard about this afternoon in the Chamber. This is a very unsatisfactory way of doing it. It increases the administrative costs. Instead  of just taking the tax off, you have to ask to get some of the tax back. Can we know something about how much of the tax they will get back so that can help us form a judgment as to how competitive this might become?

Above all, we need to know from the Minister when there will be a proper government plan—or a proper company plan approved and directed by the Government—that meets the requirements of this legislation. It says  that they are charged with the duty of making a competitive and sustainable industry. Those two words are very interesting. Does “sustainable” mean that they definitely have to close the blast furnaces on the grounds that they do not meet net-zero standards? “Competitive” implies moving into breaking even, if not into profit. We are so far away from that that it would be extremely good to have a deadline or timetable for the first plan, and the knowledge that the Commons and Lords will have an opportunity to debate that plan. Given that very large sums of money are being discussed, that a very important number of jobs are at risk—if the finances are not gripped, those jobs will eventually go— it is surely good order for a Government to be open and transparent in their dealings about such an important national industry.

Our voting system delivered a large majority to Labour. It is true the Labour vote fell, turnover was poor  and their vote share was very low. The electorate expressed their anger about the wrong policies and missed opportunities of the Conservatives, with many former Conservative voters staying home and some voting Reform.There was no switch to Labour or Lib Dem . People thought they could live with Labour’s bland Manifesto and wanted to believe in their two big promises, to smash the gangs and not put main taxes up.

You would have thought given the big majority and the weak voting base Labour would use the majority to show competence , get faster growth and stop illegal migration.  They should have recognised the public wants a government that is competent and between elections concentrates on  governing. Instead Starmer/Reeves used their majority to put through two hated big tax rising budgets, drove up unemployment, deterred investment and help fuel inflation. An often absent PM spent his time flying round the world giving away our islands, our fish, our money. Labour imploded, dumped  the election winner and brought in a new leader to shift them further left, further away from their fairly cautious Manifesto.

The modest Burnham bounce is in danger of persuading them they did need a more political Prime Minister. Instead it is more likely the clever messaging will create an ever greater gap with reality, angering people more. Voters want a government with a majority to do some serious governing, not to play more politics. Why can’t they smash the gangs? Why can’t they get unemployment down? Why can’t they slow the giddy growth in people on benefits? Why cant Mr Burnham and Mr Healey agree a budget for defence? Why do they now say there will still be long NHS waiting lists in 2029?

Failure to take action to resolve some of these problems will mean dismissal for Ministers when they do hold an election.

I have permission to reproduce charts compiled by Facts4eu, so will now publish relevant ones to add to what I write. I collaborate with them over some of their excellent research.

1. Would you support rejoining on today’s terms, without all our opt-outs?

The EU has dreamed up Made in Europe as a new protection scheme to make it more difficult for exporters to the Union. This should not apply to the UK, as the UK paid a heavy price in concessions to get a Free Trade deal when we left the EU. The UK should tell the EU the new restrictions will not apply to the UK, and we will require enforcement of the current terms and deal.

If the EU persists with its new protections then we have rights under our membership of the World Trade Organisation to retaliate. We should take proportionate similar action in response to that being taken by the EU. Meanwhile we should anyway set about reducing our excessive imports from the EU through a full throated buy British.

The government has rightly promised the Unions to do this, but so far fails to deliver. It should

1. Create a new farm subsidy scheme to replace ELMs that concentrates on assisting more food produciton
2. Cancel the excessive fish quotas for foreign fleets and help rebuild our own fishing fleet.
3. Promote onshore fish processing based on more fish landings in home ports
4. Remove high carbon taxes and the EU derived emissions trading scheme, to start to price energy intensive business back into the market
5.  Develop its wish to have more made in the UK under MOD contracts
6. Plant more trees and encourage more private planting for sustainable forestry, to reduce the excessive timber imports
7. Exploit our own oil and gas to replace more imports
8. Increase usable electricity capacity to return to being self sufficient. We import far too much dear electricity when the wind drops and the sun does not shine, so we need more despatchable UK power
9. Require government subsidised wind and solar farms to back and order from new UK factories to produce the needed equipment
10. Negotiate with chemical and petrochemical majors over how to retain and restore lost capacity.

One of my critics here complains  I do not show charts or graphs when setting out economic arguments. I do use numbers from ONS/Treasury/Bank of England/ World Bank/IMF and check the sources carefully. I do collaborate with Facts4eu.org  who produce excellent charts which I strongly recommend. Go on to their site to see the UK and EU  in great bar charts and graphs. Here is an example reproduced  from them showing how the UK economy has outperformed leading  EU countries since the referendum.

The economy has grown by 14% in real terms since the Referendum
June 2016 – June 2026