My Lords, I welcome these probing amendments and look forward to the Minister’s response to some very important general issues. It is right that the staff in all the operating companies that will be affected by this should have an early idea from the Government about what is planned for their future employment.

I am one of those who welcome the idea that we want a well-paid profession serving on the railways. For the sake of taxpayers, who are putting in substantial grant in aid and capital money, and of fare-paying passengers, who often have to pay very high fares, we need a system for negotiation between staff and Great British Railways which is more likely to achieve the increase in productivity that could justify the higher pay for staff without imposing an ever-higher charge on the taxpayer and fare-paying passengers. This is more than a detail that can be left open; we need to know who the employer will be, what the status of the current contracts is and how they will be put into transition to new contracts for the staff when their employment changes.

Is there anything the Government can tell us about how they might—they hope—have better relations with the unions in future? Can we  look forward to a better experience in getting that balance of better pay for better delivery, smarter working, adopting work practices and being willing to operate new capital investment in a way that delivers higher productivity and higher quality of service?

I also welcome my noble friend Lord Moylan’s draft of what the purposes should and could be, which may not entirely match all the Government’s aims. It would be interesting to hear from the Government which of his suggestions are intended or implied in the current legislation, so that we can have some early indication of what the mission statement of the new railway might be.

I think taxpayers and railway users are expecting more services, not fewer. That has not been the early experience of the last two years. They are expecting better punctuality and timeliness, which would also be welcome. What the new railway will definitely require is more feel for where more passenger movements are required or possible. As in the early days of privatisation, surely the early days of full nationalisation they might want to achieve a trend of rising passenger numbers. Privatisation  achieved that very well, with  the ability of companies to develop timetables and services more suited to modern travel needs and therefore fuel the continuing progress of providing more growth in passengers and revenue.

If a new railway management—the controlling mind of GBR—knows how to do that, it will make everything a lot easier if the background of the completion of these arrangements is rising passenger use, rising revenues, greater flexibility over timetables and thinking about growth rather than cost cutting and the elimination of less profitable routes. That can easily get you into a spiral of downturn, as with the nationalised railway experience for most of its time post war, until privatisation reversed those difficult trends.

I hope that the Minister will not rule out one of the modest successes of recent years, which is the ability to have a competitive challenge to the monopolist. There are times when people outside will see ways of harnessing people, talent and capital to provide additional and better service using the existing track, and for that they will clearly need fair terms for access, and that will provide an innovative stimulus to the nationalised monopoly. However, I fear that the Government will not want to do that, and so I think they will find it that much more difficult to innovate and improve the timetables without that stimulus or spur from others generating such ideas and providing such a challenge and opportunity for the growth of the railway.

This is no way to legislate for Northern Ireland. It is not right to annex part of our country to the European Union. At the time of the Windsor Framework, I and some colleagues in the Commons opposed it and pointed out that there were much easier ways of organising the trade and border arrangements between Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The Government should go back to that work and understand that we do not have here a system of handling Northern Ireland’s law and trade which meets the requirements of the loyalist community, and maybe others in Northern Ireland as well.

The Government should be ashamed of how undemocratic this process is. As the noble Lord, Lord Dodds, has rightly identified, there is no point in consulting all the people who are to be affected by regulations in these areas in Northern Ireland because the Government cannot change them—and the Government cannot be bothered to work out the impact costs, or even the impact benefits, of the regulations because they rightly understand that they are a spectator. They are not in charge of any of these things.

Then we are told in the documents that there is going to be no review of how this works out. All the other examples that come to the Commons and the Lords from government for consideration go through a proper process. There is consultation with the people they are going to affect. Both Houses expect a proper assessment of costs and benefits. We expect a proper debate and if the Government have got it wrong, we expect them to go away and change or amend it. We certainly expect there to be a review after the process, so that we can see whether it has worked out in the way that the Government wanted.

The fact that none of these things can happen on any of these SIs means that we are going to spend a lot of time, on SI after SI, complaining about the process, so I have this suggestion for the Government. They have embarked on negotiations for something they call the EU reset. So far, all I have seen is a list of things that the EU wants, with the Government indicating that they would like to give those away in order to purchase some greater friendship or influence. It is always very odd that they think you get influence by giving in to what the other party wants. That is not the way most people negotiate.

Would it not be a good idea for the Government to put to the EU that this is doing damage to relations between communities in Northern Ireland and to the way in which they are governed; that it is undemocratic; and that we surely need a new settlement over how Northern Ireland legislation and trade are conducted? I very much recommend the mutual enforcement model, where we say that we will not send anything that is non-compliant from Northern Ireland to the EU and that we do not want to impose any new barriers on the Republic of Ireland/Northern Ireland border—indeed, that we would dismantle all barriers between GB and Northern Ireland.

The Chancellor underwhelmed as he stumbled through a tedious and uninformative speech. There was no attempt to tell us when defence spending will reach the target he wanted when Defence Secretary and no comment even on how to pay for the increase he inherits from Rachel Reeves. He tells us about a £4.7 bn new black hole where the revenue to pay the extra defence bills should be. There was a complete absence of ideas to cut or control spending. Tax rises were not ruled out. More spending and more borrowing look inevitable.

He says he will back innovation and growth, but fails to say how beyond a £150 m fund for smaller businesses in the North. This tiny sum is just 0.005% of the economy! He promises a 25 % cut in business regulations without any clue of which he will cut. It is a ludicrous over claim, probably copied from the laughable EU pledge to cut its rules by 25%. Instead this government is likely to sign a humiliating EU Re set deal signing UK businesses in a number of important sectors to a wide range of additional EU rules. This is fatuous as  the  8% of UK businesses that do export to the EU already conform with their regs to sell into their market. The other 92% do not export so should not be lumbered with these needless extra costs.

He said he would deliver the findings of the Fingleton  Review and “ extend those to other sectors, including launch of a  review of the costs review of rail infrastructure”. Whatever does that nonsense mean?

1. National Insurance increase, taxing employers too much so destroying jobs
2. Banning all new exploration for oil and gas
3. Failing to agree the development of Jackdaw and Rosebank fields
4. Putting up Business rates on High Street, leading to shop closures and fewer retail jobs
5. Banning the production of diesel and petrol cars from 2030
6. Putting up energy prices to the highest in the advanced world, leading to industrial closures
7. The  Family Farms and Small Business tax has led to business closures
8. Employment Rights Act has led to fewer jobs
9. Borrowing too much has pushed up interest rates, hitting investment and housebuilding
10. VAT on school fees has closed down schools, sacking teachers

Devolution is seen by Labour as balm for a troubled   state. The way they go about it it institutionalises the divisions and builds deep resentments.

The Blair government returned to Labour’s failed previous attempts to devolve power to a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly. Gorden Brown thought that would end the rise of nationalist parties  in both countries. Labour out in a voting system designed to stop the SNP and Plaid ever gaining control. In my book The death of Britain? I pointed out the new elected bodies gave nationalist parties the perfect platform  to build independence movements  at to practice the politics of grievance. So it proved.

This new pro EU Labour leader wishes to resume with the EU agenda of breaking up England into EU style regions . These ride roughshod over counties and boroughs, the building blocks of English local government. They are tone deaf to local loyalties. Sunderland does not want to be governed from Newcastle, Exeter does not look to Bristol, the satellite towns to Manchester have different problems and outlooks to the city centre.

Worse still is the way devolution will be conducted. Many local rural and suburban communities want  less development on greenfields but will not gain powers to achieve that. Many do nit want migrant hotels and hostels but will have to take them. Many want  lower taxes by regional mayors just get powers to put taxes up and waste more money.

My Lords, I was happy to support previous Conservative Governments in implementing the triple lock, and I support the current Government in honouring their promise. This has been a useful policy in reducing pensioner poverty.

As one of the Members of this House probably keenest to control public spending, I am very conscious of cost, and I have regularly recommended that we should raise the state retirement age, which gives you a substantial reduction and is a fair way of achieving the savings. It is also very much in the spirit of this report, which I welcome; namely, that people in their 60s, unless there is disability or a serious health problem, should be encouraged to work, and they will probably have richer lives as a result. This is now possible because life expectancy is greater than when the lower state retirement pension ages were first set.

More importantly, there are now very few people who do hard manual work. Clearly, they needed a much lower retirement age because they could not continue. Now people have hydraulics, automation and robotics, so it is much more feasible to carry on working for longer. Really, the most power or muscle pressure you now need is the ability for your fingers to press a touchscreen; you are then able to do most of the interesting jobs in our community.

Those who wish to abolish the triple lock or make other changes to pension arrangements would be well advised to remind themselves that the pension is not a welfare benefit but an entitlement based on contributions to the national insurance scheme. Of course, that can all be changed, but it would require complex legislation and a lot of political argument. No Government to this day have been willing to attempt that, I suspect because it would be very unpopular with the public.

The contributory principle is, to me, fundamental. It shows that people have to work and have to pay national insurance. There is an annual sign-off of the fund, with a review. It is a pay-as-you-go fund, not an endowment fund. It embodies a very important contract between generations: the working generation say that they will pay for their parents’ generation on the basis that their children, when they are working, will then pay for them. I do not want to disturb that social contract between generations; I want to keep the contributory principle—you get something for something—and I do not want to take away the triple lock. That would be a great pity.

My Speech on what needs to be done to promote growth and prosperity.

My Lords, I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, that the national insurance increase and the farms tax were very bad ideas which did considerable damage. It is a pity that more noble Lords behind the Government did not make that clearer in time to avoid the disaster.

I hope that the new Prime Minister and new Chancellor will have learned from the bitter experience of the two Reeves Budgets, which allowed a large amount of adverse speculation, threatening everyone who is successful or enterprising or who has some savings with higher taxes. The  Government were surprised when confidence was knocked. They then  put taxes on in the Budget, which did considerable damage, and we ended up with higher unemployment, fewer job vacancies, cancelled , deferred investment projects and a lack of confidence in the business community. We need the opposite of all those things. I wish the new Prime Minister well if he can translate his TikTok optimism into a genuine set of policies which will promote enterprise, business, jobs and success, which are what is needed in this country.

As someone who has had conversations with and offered advice to a series of Prime Ministers and Chancellors on the Conservative side from Margaret Thatcher onwards, I have had the chance to observe at quite close quarters what has succeeded and quite often what does not succeed, and I have tried to learn from those experiences. I will share this piece of advice with the new Treasury team: take the bond market seriously. You may not like it and you may think it is wrong, but you are going to find it very difficult to argue with it.

Those very high costs of government borrowing now are a message. They are saying that the tax option is no longer there. Put taxes up more and you may even collect less revenue. They are saying that the spending is too high. You need to look at the benefits bill, as my noble friend the leader of the Conservatives in this House and our right honourable friend the leader of the Opposition have set out in considerable detail. They have described how sensible, modest cuts and proposals would help. By all means accelerate the work on how you can get more young people into work by positive means and get them off benefits, because that is crucial.

However, look at those interest rates. Labour made a lot of fuss when for one day under Liz Truss there was a spike to quite high levels in government borrowing costs, and some of them still carry on about it. I do not think they have understood that for the whole of 2025 and now for the whole of 2026 to date, government borrowing costs have been considerably higher than that one-day spike under Liz Truss. If the Truss spike was wrong, they are gratuitously wrong on an extended basis. There are two differences in the situation.

The Truss Government did not borrow a penny at that very high rate on the spike day; this Government are borrowing, day after day and week after week, at these very elevated rates, which are at least 20% higher than the worst rate under Liz Truss.

The Government have not persuaded the Bank of England to stop selling bonds into a very depressed market. The  thing that got the rates back down again after the Truss Budget—which was spending too much—was of course the Bank of England stopping, for a period, selling the bonds at very depressed prices. The Government need to get a grip on that because they are doing themselves and us grave damage.

I want this country to succeed, I want a strong, fast-growing economy, and I want those young people back into work. That takes lower interest rates, not higher interest rates, and it takes proper fiscal discipline. Spouting about fiscal rules does not work. You have to do the hard work and get the Budget into more balance.

I am publishing this again as it is live news, for those who did not see it last time.

As someone who studies bonds and sometimes writes about them I dread the times when they become leading news items. It is usually for a bad reason. Markets can get in a panic if governments issue too much debt or if inflation takes off, hitting the value of the bonds and driving up the interest they pay the saver.  It leads to a lot of fevered and often badly informed commentary on the media, as the media accept the credentials of some  “experts” who struggle to explain a bond in simple language or in some cases struggle to understand the bond themselves.

A bond is a government debt. Many governments like the UK and US borrow large sums from the banks, pension funds, insurance companies and the investing public. They do so by issuing a large new debt for anyone to buy a small portion of the new big loan. The buyer gets an electronic certificate that they have bought a share of the debt which states how much interest they will get on their investment, and when they will get their money back. The UK government will borrow the money for a specified time period with a fixed repayment date (the duration of the loan) and will guarantee to pay a fixed rate of interest every six months throughout the duration of the bond. Inflation linked bonds are different.

These bonds are a convenient way for funds and savers to invest. They know exactly what rate of interest they will get, like making a fixed rate savings deposit with a bank. They know exactly when they will be repaid. More importantly, they know that if their circumstances change and they need to get their money back in a hurry, they can sell their bond to someone else in the market any time it is open. So far so good.

The catch is if you do need to sell before the repayment date, you might not get back the amount you paid the government in the first place, or the amount you paid to buy the bond in the market. If interest rates go up in the meantime the value of your bond in the market goes down, as people will want to get a higher income on your bond than you are getting. They can only do this  by paying you less for the bond than the original issue price because the amount of interest paid is fixed. The interest paid is then a higher percentage of their cost of the bond than it was of your original cost of the bond.  A bond with no repayment date (like a stock with a very  distant repayment date)  issued with a promise to pay 1% interest annually will halve if the interest rate goes up to 2%, as the £1 guaranteed interest stays the same so to get 2% on that bond you can only afford to pay £50 for £100 of the original issue. £1 interest is 1% of £100 and 2% of £50.

Where I often part company with the commentariat is when I hear them say these government bonds are safe assets. If you or your pension fund had bought the UK government’s 0.5% 2061 bond at issue you would be sitting now on a 77.5% loss on your original purchase price. So if you had bought £100 worth you could sell it today for just £22.40.  These longer dated government loans or bonds are highly volatile. Before covid the Bank of England and the UK government issued a lot of debt at very low interest rates with repayment dates many years ahead. Once interest rates started going up to deal with a bad inflation, you were bound to lose a lot of money if holding these investments. It is true that if you wait until 2061 you will get your money back, but in the meantime you will only be getting an unacceptably low 0.5% on your money when a savings deposit or a shorter dated government bond would pay several times that.  If you own the 4.25%  UK  gilt  repaying in December next year you can sell your £100 worth of that for £100 today, or hold and enjoy the 4.25% annual interest for the remaining  year and bit when the government sends your £100 back.

It is true that a government bond from a reliable state like the UK or US is safer than some corporate bonds issued by some companies. They might go bust, or get into financial difficulties so they delay or cut the interest payments. The US and UK have met all their interest payments in the past and are very likely to continue to do so. That has not been true of all other governments with some failing to meet payments when they have got into financial difficulties. Germany signed a 1953 Debt Agreement cutting some of its debt obligation by agreement  with its creditors. Brazil reneged on some debts in 1987. Since 2020 Sri Lanka, Argentina, Ghana, Zambia, Ecuador, Ethiopia and Lebanon  have all defaulted or suspended some payments on debts.

It is untrue to say that any government bond with a very distant repayment date is “safe”. In times like today those bonds will sell off to low prices. They can be ravaged by inflation at any point in their long lives. Both the US and UK governments are having to pay a much higher rate of interest on  their borrowings today than at any time this century. That is because they have already borrowed too much and are refusing to rein in their high levels of new borrowing which places more strains on a  reluctant bond market. The danger is a doom loop, where higher interest rates drive up the amount government has to pay in interest charges on its debts, which in turn worry the markets as these could become unaffordable.That happened to the UK Labour government in the 1970 s when it ended up having to pay 15.5% on one of the bonds it issued. It then of course had to announce spending cuts to try to get back in control of its runaway finances.