Autumn Budget 2026

Baroness Wheatcroft Excerpts

Thursday 12th November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the maiden speeches we have heard today. There have been some excellent contributions, but we have also had some strong contributions from old codgers as well.

A breathing space for today, hope for tomorrow: that was the slogan at the start of the Budget. The Minister provided us with his idea of what a breathing space might be, and I hope that younger travellers on the Underground will continue to give up their seat for him. However, the Budget delivered a breathing space for the Government and fear for most of the population of this country—business and ordinary working people. It delivered fear because we all know that the Budget did not address the real problems; it just kicked them further and further down the road. We all know that money is short and that, in the end, there is no escape from deep cuts in services and benefits, or big tax rises, or potentially a combination of the two. It will be painful. Fear of that is now tangible, even if it is not yet affecting the markets. People have been left in limbo. It is not so much a breathing space as a place of trepidation.

Meanwhile, the Government boast of a few cash bungs to households, many of whom will see far more cash than they are given being clawed back because of the stealth tax of frozen thresholds. As the noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, explained, and others have added, everything is being put off. Even the government reviews that report do not result in action. Implementation is what we need. The spending review will surely be backloaded so that any genuine cuts come way down the line.

Then there is the 10-year plan. We can all dream, and long-term ambitions are no bad thing, but if a week is a long time in politics then a decade, and planning for one in the age of AI, is better left to Gypsy Rose Lee. What we and the country need is action, and we need it now. We need to know how we are going to deal with social care and we need to start doing it, rather than talking about it. We need to fund defence now and we need to know how it is going to be done, because the threat is real. In many people’s eyes, this country has been at war now for several years; we just have not acknowledged it. We cannot pussyfoot around any more. We need to deal with the problem and fund it. I hope that John Healey, having resigned once because he did not have the money he needed, is going to find it and tell us how.

If the Government really wanted to make it easy for people and give everybody a bit of breathing space, there is one very easy thing they could do: embrace the idea of simplification. Even in this anaemic Budget, there were almost 100 tax and fiscal changes. The Red Book says:

“The government recognises the importance of a stable and predictable tax system”.


They must be joking. Instead, what we get is constant change. Our tax system is ludicrously complicated. Tolley’s Tax Guide now runs to more than 1,000 pages. The amount of time and effort people must spend filling in their tax forms could be spent in so many more productive ways. I ask the Minister to let us know whether he will consider bringing back the Office of Tax Simplification and what he intends to do to simplify tax. While he is dealing with that, could he also address the problems in the probate system, which make life anything but easy breathing for a lot of people in this country, just at the worst possible moment in their lives, and give us all a real breathing space?