Autumn Statement 2023

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 29th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I welcome the Minister to her new post at the Treasury. That is currently a hugely and unduly powerful department. We are all familiar with departmental Ministers at the Dispatch Box, when faced with an undeniable failing, shrugging and playing the “The Treasury just won’t give me the money” card. Look at where that has got us. We have heard from many noble Lords about the state of broken Britain, so I suggest that the Minister take note of the fact that the Treasury is increasingly being held responsible for the state of the country.

I am going to look at three ways in which our system is broken. I turn first to individual and household poverty, inequality and insecurity. The Resolution Foundation has calculated that this Parliament is set to be the worst on record for household income. Incomes are projected to fall by 3.1% in real terms from December 2019 to January 2025. Many noble Lords have focused on the triple lock, but the problem is not generational. The problem is poverty and inequality, and structural changes over decades that have left our society failing to meet the most basic needs. We have, very literally, a failing economy.

Figures out today from the National Housing Federation show that the number of pre-retirement private renters in the 55 to 64 age group has increased six times the rate of the population increase in the past decade. We are going to see a huge spike in pensioners living in private rental homes that they cannot afford. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation figures show that 1 million children experienced destitution last year—a number that has almost doubled since 2019.

What is in the Green Party’s alternative Autumn Statement, released before the Chancellor stood up, for individuals? Starting with the most vulnerable, the Green Party is proposing an increase in universal credit by £40 a week, which would cost £9 billion. It is also proposing to abolish the two-child benefit cap by increasing the welfare budget by £1.3 billion. I challenge the Government, in particular the Front Bench in front of me, to say why they would not do that in order to help some of the most vulnerable who are suffering so much now.

Secondly, I turn to public poverty, inequality and insecurity. The Productivity Institute has highlighted that there has been a decade of declining spending per capita on education at all levels above primary school. Yet overall, schools have somehow—all credit to them—broadly upheld performance, as measured by the Institute for Government. They are the only group of public services, of nine in total, that has not seen a deterioration since 2010. As the Institute for Government said:

“This Government has abdicated responsibility for public services”.


There is also the question of how realistic all these plans are. The OBR has publicly doubted that the plans for further swingeing austerity in public services are actually deliverable. The director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies has described these as “implausibly tight” spending plans. It stressed the sheer impossibility of not providing a drip of bare subsistence funding to our collapsing court system, to our financially staggering local councils—as the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, highlighted—and to a DEFRA that is regularly failing to meet even its basic statutory responsibilities.

What is the Green Party’s plan? It is to restore the public health budget by increasing spending by £1.4 billion; to immediately increase NHS spending by £8 billion; and to increase access to NHS dentists by increasing spending by 50%, or £1.5 billion. Crucially, as many noble Lords might appreciate, we would provide the necessary powers and funding to rural local authorities to take back control of bus services, so that they can increase routes and service frequencies. This would cost £3 billion. Will the Labour Front Bench consider matching that?

Thirdly, I turn to nature’s poverty, inequality and insecurity. There was precious little in this Statement on the climate emergency and nature crisis that is clearly already hitting us so hard. The £960 million investment fund by 2030 for the green industries growth accelerator, which does not even start until 2025, is proportionately orders of magnitude smaller than the plans of the US and EU. Words are only words, but there was even austerity in the nature element of the Chancellor’s Statement: the number of nature-related terms used by the Chancellor in his speech almost took us back to the era of “cut the green crap”.

The Green Party’s plan is to turn ISAs green by linking their tax exemptions to investments in green bonds, and to invest an additional £3 billion in green transition grants for small businesses to help them prepare for and take advantage of the opportunities offered by greening the economy. Noble Lords will be seeing much more in green spending in our general election manifesto, and I hope that the Labour Front Bench will be confirming very clearly plans to stick to its previously announced policies, about which there has been considerable doubt.

The question I am sure that noble Lords might ask is: where is the money coming from in the Green plans? We have calculated that around £30 billion of additional funds would be available from rebalancing the tax system so that the super-rich pay their fair share and both people and planet benefit. There is enough money in our economy to make our country fairer and greener. What is lacking is the political will to change priorities.

Finally, I have a direct question to ask the Minister. The revenue side of the fiscal projections assumes that the 5p per litre cut in fuel duty will end in April and that the levy will then rise in line with inflation. This comes to a total of £6 billion a year, but of course fuel duty has not risen since 2011. I know that I cannot ask the Minister what will be said in the spring, but I can ask her to acknowledge that there is a significant gap in the Chancellor’s figures if he does not put fuel duty up in the spring by 8p per litre.