Budget Responsibility and National Audit Bill [HL]

My Lords, I realise that this is the first time that the Minister has had to face a Grand Committee and perhaps he will be better prepared next time we meet. However, as to these amendments, I have just four points to make in response to our debate. The first is purely technical, in that the Bill as drafted is inconsistent. Clause 6(1)(a) states that the charter for budget responsibility may include guidance about the, "““assessment or analysis required to be prepared under subsection (3) or (4) of””," Clause 4. However, subsection (3) of that clause refers to ““fiscal and economic forecasts””. The charter is therefore required by Clause 6 to provide guidance on economic forecasts. The Bill is inconsistent if ““economic”” is not included in Clause 1. It is not at all clear what the Government really intend to do. It is only clarity that I seek here. As noble Lords have said, there is no great economic or political point behind all this. Actually, there is a good economic point, but there is no great political point. The amendment aims purely at making the Bill consistent. My second point is that, in its consideration of fiscal policy, the OBR has to have some guidance as to the Government’s overall economic policy. Otherwise, it is not possible for the OBR to make a coherent assessment. If you do not believe me, just look at this document, the OBR’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook, which is exactly that. It is a very fine document, if I may say so. For example, the delayed rebalancing scenario and the weakening demand scenario are discussed in the document. Why is that? It is because the OBR is linking different economic performance to the consequences for fiscal performance. That is exactly what this document does. I accept the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, that we are not trying to set out some broad economic assessment committee, but, as another gloomy Cambridge economist, he should recognise that there is a clear interrelationship between economic and fiscal policy. The intention of these amendments was simply to capture that relationship. If this could be done in a better way and could make the Bill consistent, I would be very happy. If the Minister says, ““We’ll think about this and see if we can achieve that in a better way””, so that this document does not trespass beyond the mandate given by the Bill to the OBR, I would be very happy. I turn to Amendment 4. The Minister asked why the fiscal mandate should require an economic dimension. Here, there is a bit of economics involved, because there is a view among some economists that the economy has a normal rate of activity and a normal rate of employment to which it persistently returns having moved away from them because of some economic shock. It is clear that that is not the view of the economists who wrote this document, otherwise they would not have written such scenarios. It recalls the remark of the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Professor Robert Solow, that this view of policy was a vision in a dream. The fiscal mandate requires some economic dimension, because you could have different results depending on the nature of your economic policy—they are interlinked. That is all that I am trying to capture in my amendments—nothing more and nothing less. I say in response to the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, that I do not think that the drafters of the charter know what ““intergenerational fairness”” means or what the economics of intergenerational transfers consist of. The noble Lord, Lord Higgins, got it exactly right: it is about changing the rate of investment in the economy. It has nothing to do with fiscal policy as such and it should not be in the charter. The suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Oakeshott, that the word ““intergenerational”” be removed would provide some validity to a sentence that currently has none. I am afraid that I must reflect the general opinion around the Grand Committee that these points have not been answered; indeed, I am not clear that they have been understood. Accordingly, I shall need to return to them on Report, by which time some more careful thinking about them will hopefully have been done.