My Lords, the Minister has been very clear on how much it will cost. But it is not clear to me, and not for the first time, how effective the Government’s money—taxpayers’ money—will be when it is spent in this way.
My Lords, protecting the seas is one of the most pressing issues of our time, in my view. What maritime strategy do we have to make sure that these treaties have any bite? Let me remind people: soft power without hard power is no power, and we need to be able to protect those areas.
My Lords, protecting our marine environment and marine animals is probably one of the most important things we can do. Does the Minister agree that, to do that, we need a very strong Navy?
I can only repeat what I said: it is very important that we encourage our young people, and others looking to buy homes, to consider the wide range of options that are available. I mention two particular institutions that I have been talking to, Lloyds and Santander, which are already going out ther…
I am very happy to agree with the noble Lord on the first part of his question: as I have said already, GDP per capita at the time of the spring forecast was forecast to rise by 5.6% over this Parliament. That compares with a fall of 0.2% in the previous Parliament—the worst Parliament on record for…
I assume the noble Lord is referring to the publication of the farming road map. I have said that it will be published by the end of this year. Civil servants are working extremely hard on this.
No, it is not. We have had a consultation and we have 200,000 responses. We can look at those: AI is much used in the Home Office now to analyse what is happening. The key point is that the Government are trying to take action: we are trying to reduce the asylum backlog, reduce hotel use, stop small…
My Lords, I join the tributes to the noble Lord, Lord St John of Bletso. We do not often get to speak in the same debate, so I am delighted that he could not speak in the space debate and has joined us today. His speech was both gracious and extremely profound, and his is a voice that we are very mu…
The White Paper is very clear that it wants to set both metrics for performance and standards for policing. In the police accountability Bill currently going through Parliament, we have put in place a range of measures for improving police performance, improving vetting and improving standards. The …
Female genital mutilation is outlawed. The Government are taking steps, through the Home Office in particular, to give advice and support and to look at issues to do with individuals and sentencing as well. There is a programme to deal with female genital mutilation, including spotting the signs of …
I thank the noble Lord for that question. The Government look at all this in the round. As I think everyone in your Lordship’s House knows, the overall intention is to reduce net migration, but we are committed to the high skills routes and I am very happy to provide more detail on that later. We wi…
The noble Lord is right that you certainly need staff to drive the trains, and in many cases, but not all, you need conductors. I do not think the rolling stock and infrastructure strategy deals with that directly, but he is absolutely right that one of the critical things to establish reliability o…
The points the noble Lord makes are perfectly fair. Obviously, the Chancellor has to balance at any fiscal event the importance of fiscal responsibility and sustainability and the need to grow the economy. She will do so in the forthcoming Budget in the way that she always does.
We have just completed a zero-based review of the whole of government spending. If the noble Lord has areas of spending that he would like to cut, I am very happy to hear them.