Autumn Statement 2022

Lord Bridges of Headley Excerpts

Tuesday 29th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bridges of Headley (Con)]

My Lords, I start by drawing your Lordships’ attention to my entry in the register. I welcome my noble friend Lady Penn back to the Front Bench. It is excellent see her there. I absolutely echo the words we have just heard. I warmly welcome my noble friend Lady Lea. It gives me great pleasure to be able to call her “my noble friend”. I congratulate her on her excellent speech, which I am sure all noble Lords agree shows the great wealth of talent she will bring to our deliberations. I thought it was a wonderfully uncontroversial speech, and next time I very much hope that the gloves will come off.

In that spirit, the season of good will is about to be upon us, so I will try to start with some words of praise about the Autumn Statement. I think that the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are quite right to be honest with us all about the dire economic situation we are in. I agree with a lot of what my noble friend Lord Lamont said. The oncoming recession would be worse. My reading of it is that inflation would have been higher if the Government had not taken some of the measures they have announced. As my noble friend Lord Lamont said, those measures were tough.

From where I sit, the worrying reality is that although we have avoided falling into the economic abyss, we are still very close to the edge of the precipice. Why are we there? There was the mini-Budget—there is no doubt about that—and there has obviously been the economic shock of the two undeclared wars this country has fought, first against Covid and now against Putin, the impact of which my noble friend also eloquently referred to, so I will not repeat those points. I will also point to something else where I think that the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, who is sadly no longer in in his place, and the noble Lord, Lord Hain, will profoundly disagree, so I am testing the spirit of good will. I see Conservative-led Governments bit by bit defaulting to a mentality that higher spending and higher taxes are the solution to all the problems we face. My concern is that that mentality has been nurtured and watered by quantitative easing, which has become the magic money tree. Our QE addiction, as the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee warned 18 months ago, has left us perilously exposed to what might happen when the era of cheap money ended, and that era is now over. Interest rates, as we all know, are up, belatedly, to grip the tiger of inflation, and that tiger is already gnawing into household incomes, pushing up welfare costs and creating havoc with government finances.

The noble Lord, Lord Fox, is absolutely right that the Autumn Statement lays out the gruesome cost of debt servicing. It is at its highest level in a generation. In the seven minutes of my speech, if I am right in my calculations, we will spend roughly £1.5 million on debt interest. That is quite an expensive speech—I think it is six times even what Boris Johnson gets paid. More than this, our public finances are more sensitive to movements in interest rates than they have been for decades. Every one percentage point rise in short-term interest rates now adds £13 billion to debt interest costs the following year. As to the debt stock itself, despite the £60 billion of tax rises and spending cuts in the Statement, debt will be £400 billion higher in five years than forecast just back in March. Added to all this are other uncertainties. The volatility of the gas prices is one. If prices go back to their late August peak, that could add £42 billion to borrowing next year.

So, given all this, taking a step back, I think the question the Autumn Statement begs is this: as we look ahead—and when I say “look ahead”, I mean look ahead several years out—are we really addressing the enormity of the situation we are in and the need to bring spending and, with it, taxation back under control?

I fully accept the pressures we are under, as my noble friend Lord Lamont and others have said, but let us just consider spending. The cuts are not being implemented until after the next election. Even then, by 2027-28, total departmental spending will be more than £90 billion higher in real terms than at the start of this Parliament.

Consequently, in the meantime—the next couple of years—we are tackling borrowing by raising taxes. As has been said, the tax burden will be at its highest sustained level since just after World War II. Millions more people will be dragged into a higher rate of tax. Worse still, our workforce appears to be becoming sicker and more people are becoming inactive. Thanks to all this, we are destined to become poorer, which to me is the most startling fact of the Autumn Statement. Real household disposable income per person is set to see its largest fall since Suez.

Having said all this, I do not question the need for the Government to act to stabilise the economic situation—but we must beware stability becoming the stability of the graveyard, where ever-higher taxes and spending snuff out enterprise and growth. If we are to wrest control of tax and spending, we need to answer the really difficult questions and topics that I believe we—and I take full responsibility for this, as a Conservative —have failed to tackle: our appalling productivity, our planning system, and how we are going to pay for an ageing population in a sustainable way. Above all, we have to ask ourselves how we are really going to encourage enterprise, innovation and investment—the essential ingredients of growth—if we keep taxing and spending at this level.

That begs a very difficult question: what do we want the state to do? Here I sense a creeping consensus that we must somehow accept that we are in a new era of higher taxation, higher spending and a bigger state. We are told that this is the solution to the challenges we face and the way to grasp the opportunities of the future. Others will profoundly disagree, but I reject that thesis outright. It is not what I believe in, not just for reasons of principle but because this approach, I contend, will fur up the arteries of our economy. That will hinder growth, and our children’s and their children’s ability to pay for the services their generations will need.