Budget: Economic and Fiscal Outlook

Debate between Lord McFall of Alcluith and Lord Hain

Tuesday 5th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hain (Lab)]

My Lords, I hope that government talk of getting the economy back to normal will cease, because that was not a good place to be—with business investment abysmal, retail sales the worst for 25 years, productivity falling and economic growth low and slowing every year since 2014 until it finally fell to zero. Record UK employment masked widespread job insecurity, with nearly 1 million people struggling to survive on zero-hours contracts, over 1 million in temporary work or doing second jobs, and the number feeling insecure at work doubling from 6.5 million in 2010 to 13 million in 2013.

Ten years ago, the Government used the overhang from the global financial crisis, of increasing national debt and high government borrowing, as an excuse for austerity to remove £150 billion of spending power from the economy, 80% of it in public spending cuts and 20% in tax rises. But that austerity was never about balancing the budget and bringing down debt to be better prepared for a future crisis, as George Osborne and Philip Hammond have since claimed. It was ideologically driven to reduce the role of the state, leaving us grossly unprepared for precisely this kind of pandemic crisis.

The Government never spent enough on the NHS; the pandemic began with more patients than ever on waiting lists for treatment and A&E waiting times the worst on record. Britain has fewer than three doctors per thousand of our population, compared to more than four in Germany and nearly five in Norway. We have only 2.5 hospital beds per thousand people, against six in France and eight in Germany. It is as if the Government had chosen as the patron saint of the NHS Ethelred the Unready.

After the Second World War, Britain grew her way out of debt. The national debt-to-GDP ratio fell from its wartime high of 259% to a post-war low of 26% in 1990. In the past 50 years, we have had a budget surplus only six times: three of those under the last Labour Government and two under Margaret Thatcher. What brought the debt-to-GDP ratio down in the post-war period was not austerity but economic growth, spurred by massive public investment in housing and a huge investment in infrastructure—it had twice the share of GDP it has today. The NHS would not have been in peril of being overwhelmed had it not been starved of funds for so long; nor, so shamefully, would adult social care, cut by £7.7 billion these past 10 years. The old normal delivered a massively unfair deal to millions of ordinary citizens and left the economy ill-equipped to face the future. We need a new normal.

[The Senior Deputy Speaker (Lord McFall of Alcluith)]

I understand that the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Pittenweem, is absent, so I call the noble Baroness, Lady Deech.