Impact of Government Policies on Family Budgets

Debate between Lord Knight of Weymouth and Lord Campbell of Alloway

Thursday 27th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I am pleased to introduce this debate on the impact of government policy on family budgets. Before I come to the substance of my contribution, I want to say something about the choice of the word “family” in this debate. Yesterday I asked, through Twitter and Facebook, for examples of how people have been affected by government policy in the past 18 months. I quickly had a response from someone called Ma on Twitter. She—I think she may be a she—said:

“Every single politician who talks about families is talking about those with kids. That has never changed. For my entire life in this country, I’ve been an irrelevance. Why? Talk about being ‘excluded’”.

I apologise to her if she felt excluded by the use of the word “family”. Over a series of tweets she had important things to say for us in this debate. I quote:

“I’m visibly older. What happens when I need to find a new job and can’t? This government will have me out in the street. I’m way past old enough to be a grannie now. Am I supposed to live in a student flat or crummy bedsit now? One wage coming into my home to pay for fuel. How does that work, exactly? One wage to pay for housing? All very well to care about kids. I didn’t have them in part because I couldn’t afford them. So I’ll freeze now? Nae good”.

She may have been Scottish. Clearly single people are suffering under this Government as well as more traditional definitions of family and I am happy to speak for them too as best I can. The other most striking response was on Facebook from Caroline O’Brien. She wrote:

“One thing that I haven’t seen mentioned is the effect of cuts in local services on family budgets. Particularly on families with special needs children. Very often as services are withdrawn families are forced to try to make up the shortfall or see their children suffer. Whether that is getting independent assessments of educational need, private speech therapy, funding activities previously coming from youth services or providing transport. The withdrawal of EMA is going to hit us too, as my daughter starts A levels next year and as for thoughts of university, the debt levels are terrifying. I am also noticing that charities are being hit hard, so far less help is now available from them. Many of these things are just starting to have an effect but from where I am standing the future seems bleak for so many families. I know I am lucky. We can afford to buy the food we need, heat our house and pay the mortgage but is equality of opportunity for my kids really something that should be cut? After all it is the tax payer who will have to pay if my kids are unable to participate in society in the future”.

[Lord Campbell of Alloway]

Would the noble Lord forgive me for asking whether his interesting speech is within the remit of the problems of this particular Statement?

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

I am speaking to the Motion in my name around the impact of government policies on family budgets and I believe I am speaking directly to that, but I welcome the interest from the noble Lord.

Those two responses are the authentic voice of people in this country—not the poorest perhaps but certainly what has been described as the “squeezed middle”—and it is appropriate that we heard from them first in this debate.

In the remainder of my time I want to make three broad points. First, the lack of growth in the economy is hitting family budgets hard and the country desperately needs a credible and urgent plan to return to growth. Secondly, tackling two of the big inflationary items in budgets, food and energy prices, means taking on vested interests and pushing them to act in the long-term interest rather than for short-term gain. Finally, this Tory Government are failing because they are out of touch with the problems of ordinary families in this country.

I start with the last of those first. It was, I think, in George Osborne’s 2009 party conference speech that we first heard his soundbite: “We are all in this together”. The Government want us to believe that the pain is shared fairly. Does the Minister still believe that to be true? The evidence that he is hitting the poorest hardest is stark. I quote from Peter Wilby’s excellent piece in the 17 October edition of the New Statesman, where he said:

“One of Labour's most outstanding achievements in office was to reduce child poverty during an economic boom. This sounds nonsensical, but isn't. Poverty is defined relatively; children living in families that receive below 60 per cent of median income count as poor. As the median nearly always rises during a boom, more children automatically become poor unless employers increase their parents' wages or ministers increase their benefits. The Tories are about to pull off the opposite trick. In recessions, the median falls and so, unless poor families' wages and benefits are hit harder than average, child poverty automatically falls. In 2009-2010, that was exactly what happened, with 300,000 children coming out of poverty. But that was before the Tories got to work. Now, the Institute for Fiscal Studies reports, we can expect the same number (though not necessarily the same children) to go back into poverty over the next two years, despite the likelihood that median incomes will remain, at best, stagnant. You couldn't have a clearer illustration of the difference between Tory and Labour governments”.

On the income side of family budgets, we know that wage increases are not keeping up with inflation and that families are therefore suffering real-terms cuts. The Government are adding to that by their own attacks on pay in the agricultural sector by abolishing the Agricultural Wages Board, on the pay and conditions of school support staff by abolishing their negotiating body, and on public sector workers generally by imposing an effective extra tax on them through increased pension contributions beyond those being recommended by the noble Lord, Lord Hutton.

At the same time, the Government are of course cutting the benefits bill. Their cuts to housing benefits, to tax credits, to child benefit, to childcare, to educational maintenance allowance, to baby tax credits, to the maternity and health in pregnancy grants, to concessionary transport and to disability living allowance amount to a list that is long and painful. These cuts are hitting the poorest hardest, because it is the poorest who claim the most benefits, both in and out of work. Worst of all, for some families, unemployment is rising once more, with too many families now going through the trauma of a sudden collapse in their income. It is clear that “We are all in this together” rings hollow. If Ministers want to continue to claim that their choices on spending have been spread fairly, they are even more out of touch than I thought.

I turn to spending. The biggest hit on family spending overall was the Government’s decision prematurely to raise VAT to 20 per cent. As former Monetary Policy Committee member Professor Blanchflower wrote recently:

“It certainly appears that increasing VAT from 17.5 per cent to 20 per cent was a big mistake—it increased … Consumer Prices Index inflation by 1.5 percentage points and hit ordinary working people's living standards”.

His call to reverse that increase was repeated by last year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, Christopher Pissarides, who said this month:

“Cutting VAT back to 17.5 per cent … will revive job creation and reduce unemployment. Deficit reduction is best done with spending cuts when the economy is recovering, not with higher taxes in a downturn”.

Last week’s inflation figures made grim reading. CPI, the Government's preferred measure, has never been higher at 5.2 per cent, and RPI, at 5.6 per cent, is the highest since June 1991. It is little wonder that the Markit Household Finance Index published this week showed 37 per cent of UK households expecting their financial situation to worsen this month, against only 7 per cent expecting an improvement, or that the Family Lives survey of December last year found that 53.3 per cent of families said that their finances were in a worse state now than last year.

If we look at the detail of the inflation figures, we see the reality for families. Bills for gas and electricity have risen by 9.9 per cent in the past month and are up 18.3 per cent since last year. Transport has risen 12.8 per cent in the past year and food is 6 per cent higher than 12 months ago. I expect that my noble friend Lady Smith of Basildon will talk about energy prices in her speech, but we know that the poorer you are, the higher the proportion of income is used in food and heating. I fear that this winter many more will have to choose between the two as the decision to cut winter fuel payments to £200 for over-60s and £300 for over-80s adds to the misery.

With regard to fuels costs, I have to press the Government on why they are not giving teeth to the groceries code adjudicator. This new body will be funded by the supermarkets. The responsible Minister, Ed Davey, has said it will “safeguard the consumer interest”, and it will lead, in the words of the National Farmers Union to,

“fewer instances of flagrant bully-boy tactics … by the supermarkets”.

Yet the Government have rejected two Select Committee reports calling on them to implement the regulatory body quickly. It was ready to go last summer. The Government rejected proposals to allow it to fine without a resolution in both Houses of Parliament and to allow it to act on anonymous complaints. On the three big tests, the Government have shown that they are unable to resist the power of the vested interests of the supermarkets and unwilling to set up an effective regulator—the effective regulator that consumers and producers of food want and need.

Since the Minister is so well briefed on Europe now, and given the warm relationship that the Prime Minister has developed in Europe with the likes of President Sarkozy, perhaps the Minister can tell us how we will get heard on more radical reform of the common agricultural policy, which his friends in the TaxPayers’ Alliance claim costs every household in this country £398 per year in higher food prices. If the Government are serious about helping family budgets, they must be willing to take on the short-termism and vested interests that are raising food and energy prices. That is the new bargain with business that Ed Miliband talked about last month in Liverpool and it is sorely needed.

Finally, what families in this country need more than anything is growth in the economy. Growth brings jobs, job security and consumer confidence. We are in a vicious circle that needs reversing. Today’s British Retail Consortium figures show 23,000 fewer workers in high-street stores than a year ago because of the collapse in consumer demand. How are the Government going to reverse it? To get the economy moving, we need spending to increase. As we have seen, that certainly will not come from consumers. Despite the welcome deal overnight in the eurozone, the best prospect of an export-led recovery is if China starts to import more, and we cannot see any signs of that. The lack of delivery by Project Merlin means that the prospects of businesses accessing the finance that they need are poor, so they are unlikely to start spending either.

That leaves the Government. In this downward spiral, we need a kick-start from the Government. That is the consistent lesson from history. We need a plan for growth. Call it plan A plus, call it plan B, call it whatever you like, but give us a plan for growth that will work. The Shadow Chancellor, Ed Balls, has offered his plan: reverse the VAT increase until growth is sustained; cut VAT to 5 per cent for home improvements; bring forward investment in schools and hospitals; repeat the bankers’ bonus tax to invest in building new homes and thereby create work for 100,000 more young people; and offer small business a national insurance incentive to take on new staff.

The Minister may say we cannot afford to do it; we say we cannot afford not to. Where else is growth going to come from? Families in this country are up against it. The conversations around the kitchen table are very bleak. Too many cannot tighten their belts much more, and the real impact of many of the cuts is still to come. The poorest are hit the hardest. It is not fair. Without a change of heart from this Government and without serious progressive measures, I fear massive social problems, a sustained recession and a blight on families’ chances for a generation. The families of this country need action now.