Autumn Statement

Lord Higgins Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Higgins (Con)]

My Lords, somewhat to my surprise, I find that I have been making speeches in Parliament on Budgets and Autumn Statements for 50 years. Over that time, things have changed quite a lot. On the one hand, the Autumn Statement has been made increasingly close to Christmas, while, on the other, it has become more like a Budget. In that context, this Autumn Statement therefore contains two elements: specific proposals and economic management.

As to the first, this is one of the most imaginative autumn “Budgets” that we have ever had. It is extraordinary to cover everything from stamp duty to international tax avoidance, and from Select Committees on apprenticeships and so on to umbrella companies. Noble Lords may well ask what umbrella companies are. This is precisely the question that a Select Committee was set up in your Lordships’ House—for one of these rapid, six-month reviews—to deal with. It is gratifying to find that, apparently, the Chancellor is proposing to act on the problems that that Select Committee identified.

There were a great many proposals in the Statement and, as I said yesterday, I particularly welcome the VAT relief on hospices. I was wondering why I did not include that when I was steering the original VAT legislation through the House of Commons. The answer was that there were very few hospices. At that time, I had been involved in founding the second of them. That perhaps explains why that was so, but I am slightly surprised that the Chancellor thinks he can do that, because the Treasury has been assiduous in preventing the extension of VAT reliefs to anyone. Perhaps my noble friend can confirm the answer: that the relief will be given in the form of a refund, rather than zero-rating. If that is the case, it will be still be just as welcome and help hospices considerably.

I turn to the question of economic management and, of course, the deficit. We must recognise, and the Government recognise, that the Chancellor failed to hit his targets. I am not surprised by that. In the first speech I gave when the coalition came into operation, I pointed out the immense difficulties of cutting public expenditure. I have been through that set of problems myself but, none the less, we have reached a stage where it has been halved, and that is most certainly to be welcomed. However, crucially, the Chancellor has made it absolutely clear that he is going to persist with carrying through in his determination to eliminate the deficit and move us into surplus. The fact that Gordon Brown allowed himself to go on increasing the deficit, rather than running a surplus, when things were going well is much of the cause of our present problems. I therefore very much hope that the Chancellor will persist with reducing the deficit.

None the less, the economy is growing at 3%. That is nearly—in fact, I think it is—the fastest rate we have ever achieved. The difficulty now is to judge at what stage we run into the limit on productive potential. We need to ensure in the end that capacity, the productive potential and the level of demand are increasing at the same speed. The difficulty is that we do not really know how much of our productive potential was destroyed in the crisis. None the less, it is right to see how we go on that. It is crucial to increase the productive potential, and I therefore welcome the paper published the day before the Autumn Statement on the need to improve our infrastructure. A measure of how behind we have fallen on this is the road programme. As someone who has been advocating a bypass for Worthing for 33 years in the Commons and for another 17 here, what I do not understand is why now it is said that there will be some improvements to the A27 but the bypass will be at Arundel. My noble friend Lord Eden, from the south coast, may laugh but there is no main north-south route running to Arundel, whereas there is to Worthing. At all events, my noble friend the Minister who is to reply is involved in the infrastructure programme and I very much welcome what he is proposing.