Jobs and Growth
Debate between Liam Byrne and Tobias Ellwood(12 years, 6 months ago)
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Mr Ellwood
My hon. Friend makes an important point. This is a busy year for tourism in Britain and we must get those aspects right. This is not the first time that those points have been mentioned in this debate, and I think that the Chancellor has taken them on board.
The other thing I would like to point out about the local elections—this will be the same in future elections—is the deluge of news that has been thrown at us by the 24-hour news industry. We must think about how the message is managed, not just about the message itself. The Budget is remembered more for Labour’s sensationalist catchphrases, which have been heard again today, than for its game-changing announcements, such as the increase in the personal allowance, which will affect 24 million people; the largest single rise in pensions ever; and the cuts in corporation tax, which make us the most competitive country in the G8.
The latest phrase that Labour is peddling, which has leaked into the media, is “double-dip recession”. If I took my son, Alex, to the fairground and we went on a rollercoaster called “The Double Dip”, he would be pretty disappointed—even at the age of three—if the second dip was eight times smaller than the first. Labour is being disingenuous with the figures and undermines our economy by constantly peddling that phrase. [Interruption.] I hear Labour Members grumbling, so perhaps we should look at the figures. The Q1 results for 2012 were better than the GDP growth results for 2011, which suggests that the graph is going in the right direction.
Amendment of the Law
Debate between Liam Byrne and Tobias Ellwood(13 years, 8 months ago)
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Mr Byrne
Of course, and the hon. Gentleman will also recognise that, despite the fact that we are some way out of the recession, today’s figures also confirmed that in the last quarter for which records are available, the economy shrank. I am not sure that that is a record of which he can be proud.
In the circumstances, I would have thought that the House could expect to hear rather more from the Secretary of State about what the Budget would do to get people back into work. The Office for Budget Responsibility is well aware of the Secretary of State’s Work programme and the Chancellor’s tax breaks on offer for business, yet its conclusion was the cold fact that unemployment will continue to rise. Every time the Chancellor stands up at the Despatch Box to deliver a Budget, he revises down his forecast for growth and revises up his estimate for the number of unemployed people in our country. He is costing this country a fortune.
What, then, did this Budget offer for jobs? Incredibly, it said that by the first quarter of 2013, unemployment would be 200,000 higher than was forecast just last October. What a triumph! Under the circumstances, we could have expected a rather bigger push from the Secretary of State and his right hon. Friend the Chancellor to get people back to work. After all, his Minister for the unemployed, the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell, told the Select Committee on Work and Pensions on 14 March:
“If there was a very substantial change in the labour market, one way or the other, frankly, that is the kind of circumstance in which we might need to revisit some of the assumptions.”
Well, 200,000 more people on the dole sounds like rather a substantial change to me.
What is the Government’s response? Some £20 million for work experience. This morning I had a look at the Secretary of State’s accounts for January. It would appear that his new work placement scheme, which was so proudly trumpeted this morning, will cost less than his Department spends on stationery every year. At the very least, we would have expected more resources for the Work programme. The Prime Minister is fond of telling us that the Work programme is
“the biggest back-to-work scheme this country has seen since the 1930s.”—[Official Report, 16 February 2011; Vol. 523, c. 951.]
In fact, as the BBC has shown, there are 250,000 fewer places on it than Labour had last year, when unemployment was lower. The association of bidders for the Work programme now has so much confidence in the Secretary of State’s plans that it says:
“the design of the Work Programme is fraught with risks which may impact significantly on the number of unemployed people who can benefit from it”!
That is hardly a vote of confidence. When my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster North (Ms Buck) asked the Secretary of State how much extra he had received from the Treasury to get people back to work, he refused to give her a straight answer, and we all know what that means: that he asked for nothing and he got nothing. With unemployment now forecast to rise, the very least that we could expect from this Secretary of State is to stand up for his Department, fight his corner and get some extra help to get this country back to work.
Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)
The right hon. Gentleman understands that whoever had won the last election would have had to introduce some tough measures, and we are experiencing those now. Bearing in mind that all other recessions have seen unemployment rising, is he genuinely telling the House that if Labour had won the last general election, unemployment would be continuing to fall today?
Mr Ellwood
The right hon. Gentleman is being very generous in giving way, but this is an important point. Labour was in denial before the election about introducing major measures to bring the economy under control. Labour now knows—as we have known—that important measures needed to be introduced after the election. That is what is causing the difficulties now. He is now saying, “Yes, you’d be able to bring those measures in without having any effect on employment.” That is completely wrong; he misleads the House.
Mr Byrne
Well, let us go through it, shall we? The deficit plan that we put in place would have involved £57 billion-worth of discretionary action—[Interruption.] Will the Secretary of State just pause for a moment? I know that he has read all 40 pages of chapter 6 of the Budget that was published in March last year, but let me just remind him of their contents: £57 billion-worth of discretionary action; £19 billion-worth of tax rises; and £38 billion of cuts, £18 billion of which would have fallen on capital, and £20 billion of which would have fallen on current expenditure, of which £12 billion would have fallen in Whitehall, £5 billion would have fallen on lower priority projects and £3 billion would have been achieved through a pay freeze and asking public sector workers to—