Budget Resolutions

Debate between Chris Evans and Edward Leigh

Wednesday 11th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

There have been some fine maiden speeches, and I particularly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Grantham and Stamford (Gareth Davies). He is a fellow Lincolnshire MP and he spoke without notes—a worthy successor to Mrs Thatcher from the birthplace of our great former leader.

Although we have had a fine victory, it is important that we maintain our sense of momentum as Conservatives, so I will now do what I usually do—I know this is deeply unfashionable in these debates—and give a Thatcherite speech, as I happen to believe that that is the best way of creating wealth in our country. I will start by drawing attention to three items of public expenditure, as examples of waste in public spending. I have just completed 18 years on the Public Accounts Commission and Committee, and I am convinced that we have a lot more to do to root out waste in public spending. Unless we do that, it is neither advisable nor prudent to go on increasing public spending at the current rate.

I will begin with one example that is close to home, because expenditure on decant from our own parliamentary building is now set to rise to more than £10 billion. The incompetence of that project does not bear any scrutiny whatsoever. First, the Joint Committee on the Draft Parliamentary Buildings Bill was told that Parliament could decant because there was room to build a temporary Chamber in a courtyard of Richmond House. Once it produced its report, however, it was told that the measurements were wrong, and that the Chamber could not fit in it. We are now told that we will have to demolish Richmond House, which will produce 25,000 tonnes of carbon. Costs are rising all the time—we have seen the exponential rise in the cost of refurbishing and renewing Elizabeth Tower. Where will it all end?

I have been working with SAVE Britain’s Heritage, the architectural heritage association, and we have proven that far from it being necessary to demolish Richmond House, we could build, at much cheaper cost, a perfectly satisfactory temporary Chamber in one of its courtyards. Even better, we could do what they did in the war—this House could decant to the House of Lords, and we could take services in from outside. That is one example. It is very close to home, and involves expenditure of up to £20 billion in London. We do not need to be spending that much money on ourselves in London; we should be a one-nation Government, and there is a much cheaper solution with which we can save public money.

[Chris Evans]

rose—

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I cannot give way; I have less than eight minutes to speak.

Secondly, there is High Speed 2. I will not go through all the arguments, but I do not think anybody would begin that project now if they knew that costs would increase to at least £100 billion. Again, the incompetence of the project defies belief. As was said earlier, the original justification for HS2 was speed, but that has now been dropped and we are told that it is all about capacity. We could have solved so many of those problems with better digital signalling, or by laying down lines with existing technology, but instead we are now trapped in this project.

I have told the Government that I will support the project—it now costs £100 billion—if they will release just £1 million to persuade London North Eastern Railway to kickstart a through train to Cleethorpes and Grimsby, via Market Rasen. There are already many good, fast express trains to Birmingham and Manchester, yet a quarter of a million people living in north-east Lincolnshire do not have one through train to London. They have to take a slow service that lasts the best part of three hours, changing trains to get to London.

A third example—I see the Chair of the Defence Committee is in his place—is the farce of the procurement of aircraft carriers. Again, I will not go into all the arguments, but there was a change in specification, the stop-go, and the fact that the Labour Government delayed it for a year when I was Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, which costs us £100 million. There was a whole emphasis on a prestige project for the Royal Navy, rather than on building a smaller specification aircraft carrier, or concentrating on what we really needed the Royal Navy to do, which was to protect our fisheries, and protect our coasts from migrant incursions.

Those are three examples of wasteful public spending. I will not even talk about all the money wasted on huge IT projects, such as Tony Blair’s initiation of the new IT project for GPs that left us £12 billion in the red—we could go on and on. Promising to spend more public money is not the solution, and every Conservative MP should wake up every morning, come to the Chamber, and argue for a smaller state, and for reduced and simpler taxation. We still have, outside India, the longest tax code in the world. We still have a staggering number of tax reliefs. In October 2019, there were 1,190 reliefs, of which 362 were tax expenditures. The sum of the estimated cost of those tax expenditures, in tax that the Government have opted not to collect, was £155 billion. In 2018, the 23 largest tax expenditures had a forecast cost of £143 billion. Some 92% of forecast costs are tax expenditures. We still have a highly complex tax system. We have armies of accountants persuading businesses, large and small, to avoid taxes. If we could just begin to simplify taxes, we would make so much progress.

I have probably sat through 40 Budgets in this Chamber. I do not remember many of them. Once one has got past the next day’s headlines and read the Red Book, one realises that, really, the Government have probably taken back just about the same amount of money that they dished out. However, I do remember one Budget where Nigel Lawson set out to simplify taxation. If one reads Charles Moore’s biography of Margaret Thatcher, one can see that that was a popular Government. Nigel Lawson reduced the top rate of taxation from 60% to 40%. For all but a few months, the Labour Government were prepared to keep that top rate of 40%. That was a dynamic Budget and a Budget of simplification.

That is what I want this Conservative Government and this Chancellor to do as they gear up for the future. I want the Chancellor to look at the far horizon and say, “I am a Conservative. I believe in low taxes and simple taxes.” As Nigel Lawson said, if we reward entrepreneurs we get more entrepreneurship. Let us also learn the lesson of Wandsworth. I understand that a certain person who is now prominent in No. 10 was running Wandsworth Council for many years. Why have we been so successful in Wandsworth? Why do people queue up to vote Conservative in Wandsworth? Because the Conservatives deliver good governance and low taxation. That is what I will continue to argue for.