Spring Forecast Statement

Lord Skidelsky Excerpts

Tuesday 17th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

My Lords, the eloquent speech this evening by the noble Lord, Lord St John, reminded me yet again of what this House is losing by chucking out its hereditary Peers.

I want to take advantage of the slightly longer time allowed to Back-Benchers to make a technical point about language, before going on to the question of policy. Whether intended or not, most of the OBR’s prose is unnecessarily unintelligible to the ordinary person. For example, paragraph 1.12 says:

“Labour market conditions continue to loosen”,


with entrants into the labour force facing “subdued hiring demand”. What this means is that unemployment continues to rise, with school leavers finding it harder to get jobs now. Why not say that? What is meant by “subdued hiring demand”? What is unsubdued hiring demand? Even in this august House, I doubt whether many Peers would be able to give an accurate answer to what unsubdued hiring demand means. There is a whole battery of theoretical assumptions behind that sort of phrase which need to be unpicked. My general point is that the OBR should spell out its theoretical positions so that the reader can grasp intuitively whether they make sense to them.

There is another issue here: the problem of forecasting, to which the noble Lord, Lord Redwood, and other noble Lords have referred. This arises from the obfuscation in OBR prose of the distinction between risk and uncertainty. In OBR-speak, those two terms are identical, but actually they are not. Risk gives you a set of probabilities; uncertainty means you do not have the foggiest what is going to happen. The whole business of forecasting outcomes over five years and then protecting oneself against inevitable failure by invoking stochastic shocks seems completely fraudulent. The biggest stochastic shock around at the moment is President Trump, yet you do not find any effect that he has on the smooth undulations of the five-year forecasts presented by the OBR.

Now for a breath of fresh air. The OBR ruminates that:

“If unemployment fell more sharply and returned to its equilibrium rate in 2027-28, two years earlier than our central forecast, borrowing could be lower by £16 billion a year on average from 2026-27”


onwards. In plain English, that means that if unemployment were lower, the budget deficit would be smaller. A striking thought: then why not make unemployment lower? There are many ways in which one might do it, but I will refer to just one. In 1929, the Liberal leader, Lloyd George, pledged to cut unemployment by half within a year by means of a £250 million investment programme. He never got the chance, but it may be of interest to translate it into today’s terms: as a share of GDP, £250 million in 1929 is equivalent to £80 billion to £90 billion today.

The noble Lord, Lord Livermore, has talked of an additional £120 billion programme that this Government have authorised over the length of this Parliament, but my understanding is that that is only £20 billion more than what the Conservatives had planned, and the stimulus of £1 billion to £2 billion in the next year is vanishingly small. I may be wrong, and I will happily be corrected if I am, but one needs to be clear about what stimulus the Government are actually giving the economy at this time.

It will be argued that the output gap today is much lower than it was in 1929, but is this true? Output gap estimates depend heavily on the unemployment rate—the higher the rate, the larger the gap. With headline unemployment only 1% above the equilibrium rate, the output gap seems very small, less than 1%, but is this a proper measure of spare capacity in the economy? Of course not. Our current headline unemployment rate of 5% excludes the 3.3% of involuntarily employed part-time workers—people who say they want to work longer but do not have the chance. If we put those two together, we have something like a spare capacity, accurately measured, of 8% or 9% underemployment. I would like the OBR—maybe the Treasury could instruct it—to put two charts side by side showing the unemployment rate and the underemployment rate, and then we could really see what the extent of our output gap actually was.

My last point is that unemployment is not the only measure of spare capacity. There are 1 million NEETs—young people between the ages of 16 and 24 not in education, employment or training. The Chancellor’s youth guarantee scheme guarantees only 55,000 places after 18 months’ unemployment. What is needed, as Paul Nowak, general secretary of the TUC, has often said, is a genuine youth employment/training guarantee on a far larger scale, organised locally as well as nationally, so that the jobs and training reflect the differing needs of different communities.

We are told that we cannot do any of this because of the fiscal rules. My answer to that is what Keynes said in 1933:

“Look after unemployment, and the budget will look after itself”.


That may be too bold for our rulers today, but I say to the Chancellor that if one wishes to gain anything then one needs to dare in order to gain something. The real risk is to do nothing and be overwhelmed by events.

Autumn Budget 2025

Lord Skidelsky Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

My Lords, first, I distance myself from the Opposition’s onslaught on Rachel Reeves. To my mind, she is a tragic figure rather than an incompetent one. She is trying to do her best for her people and the country but is in hock not just to the bond markets but to mistaken academic orthodoxy which, via the OBR, polices her choices. As Keynes wrote—this is the first time Keynes has been mentioned this afternoon—it is the ideas of economists

“which are dangerous for good or ill”.

The Treasury and OBR officials, newspaper columnists and market traders who make up today’s conventional wisdom are slaves of recently defunct economists.

The OBR gives a rare glimpse into the official mind when it writes:

“we assume that forward-looking households and firms save some of extra after-tax income from the near-term fiscal loosening, in anticipation of the future fiscal tightening”.

Economists know this as Ricardian equivalence: there is no such thing as a free lunch; do not spend more now, because you will have to pay for it later. The noble Baroness, Lady Neville-Rolfe, said much the same thing in her speech. Now, the Chancellor front-loads her rather meagre spending increases, back-loads her much larger tax increases and hopes that something good will turn up in the meantime.

A rare glimpse of sensible dissent came from the Guardian editorial of 27 November. It said:

“The state can create fiscal space whenever it chooses, and the economy will revive when it spends. Stagnation ends when the government stops starving the system”.


I have two questions to expand on this heretical insight. First, what has happened to the £900 billion quantitative easing money printed since 2009? I think the answer is that a large part of it has stayed in financial circulation, raising the price of bonds, equities and properties, but doing little to raise current output. Keynes referred to this attitude as liquidity preference. Others call it the financialisaton of the economy. The point is that money does not just fructify in the pockets of the people; it has to be spent on things which can be produced.

Secondly, there is the productivity puzzle. Where has all the productivity gone? A nation’s standard of living depends upon its productivity, and productivity largely depends on investment. When firms invest in new capital, skills and infrastructure, output per person rises. The UK is not just the lowest-investing countries in the G7; it is near the bottom of government investment as a share of GDP. It is the prolonged failure of private and public investment that has trapped us in low productivity and flat incomes.

So what is the answer? I do not decry the importance of business and supply-side reforms, but if businesses see no profit in investing, the state has to step in, not step out, and produce the additional demand that will give businesses the confidence to invest. Public investment has to be intelligently done, of course, and proper attention paid to distribution—this was a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Sikka. And this was Keynes’s message; it is not original to me. It served us well for 25 years. But now Keynes has been cancelled, leaving the Chancellor in her fiscal straitjacket and the people of this country poorer than they would otherwise have been.

Economic and Taxation Policies: Jobs, Growth and Prosperity

Lord Skidelsky Excerpts

Thursday 13th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

My Lords, I would also like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Elliott, for giving us a chance to discuss this important question, and it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell.

Economic commentary has been dominated by the fiscal hole—said to be £30 billion—facing the Chancellor. To stick to her fiscal rules, Rachel Reeves will have to raise taxes, or cut spending, or do both, but she has promised not to raise taxes and has promised to increase public spending. She is, therefore, in a bind. However, this fiscal straitjacket depends on two assumptions: first, that there will be little or no economic growth in the next four years; and secondly, that the British economy is already at or near full employment. These are reasonable forecasts based on recent trends. However, since 2008, average economic growth has been about 1.5% a year, a full percentage point lower than before, and much of that has been down to the increase in population. Living standards for the majority have hardly risen and productivity has been flat, and the OBR expects this to continue. The noble Lord, Lord Elliott, emphasised the need for abundant employment, but I would suggest a different path from the one he has outlined.

With headline unemployment at 1.8 million, we are tolerably close to what we think of as full employment, though it has gone up a little to 5% recently. Is this a true measure, though, of spare capacity? Apart from the headline count, we have four million, or 10% of, working-age people claiming either disability or incapacity benefits, plus 1 million NEETs: that is, those between 16 and 24 who are not in education or in employment. In addition, 7.7 million are employed part-time. Then there are those who have left the labour market altogether. Some of these categories overlap, but if one were to add up the full-time unemployed, part-time workers who want to work more, those on disability benefits who could do some work, and the discouraged, one could get a better measure of spare capacity than the headline count alone. Estimates suggest the figure would be about 10% to 15% of the labour force. This, if true, would justify greater fiscal loosening than the OBR considers prudent. That is the first point.

How do we get the underemployed back into work? It is not simply a question of increasing demand—the old Keynesian formula. One has to rebuild supply. To give one example, the Government have unveiled a youth job guarantee scheme covering ages 18 to 21. Every young person who has been on universal credit for 18 months without earning or learning will be offered a guaranteed work placement, with the aim of helping them to transition into full employment. I welcome that initiative; it is very important. I like to think that it was influenced by a paper entitled Job Creation is the New Game in Town, which I co-authored with Gordon Brown five years ago. We wrote:

“Regional and local government job and training schemes”


for young people

“are essential to the task of reallocating work and skills into the labour market”.

We went quite a lot further, but I do not have the time to go into that. The basic idea was that there should be a public sector job guarantee, with a buffer stock of state-supported jobs and training schemes that expands and contracts with the business cycle. A job guarantee of this kind could take up a large part of the slack in the labour market. By raising the rate of economic growth, it would help reduce the deficit, and the guaranteed training and apprenticeship part of the scheme would directly address the productivity problem. So I urge the Government to fight the bond vigilantes and the tax cutters with a positive programme of economic renewal.

Spring Statement

Lord Skidelsky Excerpts

Thursday 27th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

My Lords, do the Government believe that we have a shortage or a surplus of labour? The question arises because the OBR has calculated an output gap of 0.5%, closing by 2027, which suggests that we actually have full employment, yet that flies in the face of common sense. We have 1.5 million people, or 4%, unemployed; 8.4 million, or 20%, working part-time; 2.3 million, or 5%, on disability benefit; 3.3 million, or 8%, on incapacity benefit; and 4.2 million, or 10%, drawing sickness benefit. I am not suggesting that they are all available to work—of course that is not true—but some of them are. Can the Minister ask the OBR to make clearer the basis of its calculations of capacity and output gaps? On those depends the whole success of the Government’s economic strategy.

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for his question and his expertise on this matter. He rightly highlights one of the most important challenges facing this country, which is inactivity. We have far too many people who are economically inactive. We are the only country in which inactivity has not reduced to pre-pandemic levels at this point, and that clearly is not a sustainable situation. A lot of our policies are driven towards ensuring that people can re-enter the labour market, exactly as he says. On speaking to the OBR, I am more than happy to make that point to my colleagues.

International Banking: Payments

Lord Skidelsky Excerpts

Thursday 28th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Collins, stated in this House on 15 October:

“Sanctions … are a crucial tool to weaken Russia’s ability to attack Ukraine”.—[Official Report, 15/10/24; col. GC 21.]


After nearly three years of sanctions, do the Government still consider them to be an effective tool, especially in the light of the evasions which have been mentioned earlier in the debate? I call upon the Government yet again to give an undertaking to publish their assessment of the effectiveness of the sanctions regime, so we can have an evidence-based debate on the subject rather than being fobbed off with mere assertion.

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

The answer to the noble Lord’s first question, in terms of whether we consider them effective, is yes. In the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, these measures have dramatically reduced Russia’s access to global financial markets and weakened its ability to finance its illegal invasion of Ukraine. Russia’s increasing reliance on North Korean and Iranian weapons highlights the impact these sanctions have had. We will pursue any necessary steps with our allies to maintain and reduce opportunities for the circumvention or evasion of international sanctions.

Autumn Budget 2024

Lord Skidelsky Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

My Lords, there are many things to welcome in this Budget, particularly on the spending side. I am less keen on some of the tax proposals, which seem to be mean-minded and counterproductive, such as the tax on knowledge.

The spending commitments are important because they reverse the disastrous policy of austerity, which has brought our public services and infrastructure close to collapse. Even the IMF, originally a champion of austerity, admitted that it had underestimated what it called austerity’s negative multipliers, which is simply code for it having been disastrously wrong in estimating the negative effects of austerity.

The cost of austerity has been severe. Median per capita income is lower than it was in 2010. The public debt to GDP ratio has gone up from 70% to 100%. By far the most important reason for this has been weak economic growth. This means that the Chancellor gets less help from the denominator in the debt to GDP ratio. Austerity has been a crucial cause of low economic growth. It is a vicious circle: cuts in public spending reduce the growth rate, which raises the debt to GDP ratio, which raises the interest rate on government debt, which requires austerity to counter it, and so on. We have to get out of this.

The Chancellor has tried heroically to escape this trap by tweaking the fiscal rules; for example, by reclassifying public sector debt as public sector net financial liabilities. I think that the Government hope to squeeze an extra £50 billion spending headroom from these and other measures. Perhaps one should welcome any sleight of hand which loosens the iron grip of the Treasury.

However, honesty compels me to say that current capital account distinctions in the public sector are full of holes. Are student loans to be counted as assets, even though most of them will never be repaid? There are other questions such as that. The Chancellor will also need to persuade sceptical businessmen that the publicly owned national wealth fund will produce, over the years, net assets rather than net debts. I understand all those things, but economic orthodoxy forces the Chancellor to tell an incomplete story. In her narrative, there is no mention of demand, only supply.

The sagacious Paul Johnson of the IFS warns that if you really want to spend more, you will have to tax more; that is right, but as any economist will tell you, how much more depends on how much spare capacity there is in the economy. Bringing idle plant and labour into use gives you a free lunch. How much spare capacity is there in the British economy? If we add up the inactivity rate and part-time working, it is at least double the headline unemployment rate of 4% or so that we read about, so there is scope to boost demand as well as to improve supply.

For those who want to increase public spending while maintaining fiscal probity, I recommend an ancient piece of fiscal machinery known as the balanced budget multiplier. The idea behind it is that an increase in government spending balanced by an equal increase in taxes yields a positive multiplier—I would be happy to explain why to any noble Lords who find this puzzling. But the last thing the Conservative Party wants to do is to balance the budget by raising taxes; its fiscal zeal is concentrated on austerity. The Labour Party is more open-minded and generous; that is why it is a good thing that Rachel Reeves, and not Jeremy Hunt, is in charge of the Treasury.

Spring Budget 2024

Lord Skidelsky Excerpts

Monday 18th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

My Lords, I am afraid I do not share the admiration the noble Baroness has for the Laffer curve, as I shall try to explain a little later. The opportunity given to this House by a debate on the Budget is not to vote on its proposals, as we do not have the power to do that. However, it is to probe the fiscal philosophy which underpins it and see whether it makes any sense. That is what I would like to do.

It is not an easy task. Walter Bagehot said of a well-known 19th-century politician that his success lay in leaving out the premises on which his arguments depended. One can say the same about Jeremy Hunt; he is no Nigel Lawson, who had no fear in displaying his premises. In his Mais lecture of 1987, Lawson said it was the task of macro policy to control inflation, and of micro policy to secure full employment, reversing the Keynesian wisdom of his day. This has been roughly the philosophic stance of British Governments—both Conservative and Labour—ever since.

The Bank of England was entrusted with the control of inflation; reforms in the product and labour markets, like deregulation and weakening trade unions, were relied on to reduce unemployment to its “natural” level—that is full employment, as it was subsequently understood to be. If we look at the Hunt Budget from this point of view, one fact stares out: his assumption that the British economy is now at full employment. The headline unemployment rate is 3.8% and is forecast to stay at 4%—that is at about 1.5 million of a total labour force of 32 million—for the next two years. It is the lowest rate for 16 years, as the Chancellor was quick to point out. Surely, it is about as good as it gets.

What it seems to show is that there is no spare capacity in the British economy: our problem is a shortage, and not a surplus, of labour. This is a statistical miasma, however. Around 9.25 million of the working-age population is classed as economically inactive, giving an inactivity rate of 22%. To argue that in this situation the economy is at full employment, and that there is no spare capacity, seems perverse. It is much more in line with common sense to say that a proportion of that 22% would want to work if there was a demand for their labour.

In short, I would argue that we have a Keynesian problem of deficient demand and not just one of insufficient or inefficient supply. It does not show up in the headline unemployment numbers but in the withdrawal of part of the population from participation in the economic life of the community. It is worth remembering that Keynes did not talk about unemployment equilibrium—that was a later phrase —but underemployment equilibrium. We have had this situation for a number of years. Whatever the supply-side contribution to it—and I understand the rise in poverty, disability, and mismatch of skills and jobs—insufficient demand has also played a part.

We are told that inflation is on the downward trend, due to the Bank of England’s high interest rates and the Government’s sound fiscal policies. Completely ignored in this assessment, however, is the influence of energy prices on inflation. Has the OBR factored in the increase in energy costs which would follow from, for example, the closure of the Suez Canal? That is a real possibility. We need to remember that inflation is not caused just by expanding the money supply at full employment; we had stagflation in the 1970s, when inflation was due to a supply-side shock.

An important aspect of the sound money policy the Chancellor credits with bringing down inflation was the fiscal austerity practised by successive Conservative Governments after 2010. I quote from the Budget speech:

“It was only because we responsibly reduced the deficit by 80% between 2010 and 2019 that we could provide the £370 billion to help businesses and families in the pandemic”.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/3/24; col. 839.]


The alternative view, which I share, is that the austerity policy prevented a full UK recovery from the great recession of 2008-10. Had George Osborne not slashed public spending, the UK would have been in a much better fiscal position to face the pandemic. As I wrote in the Financial Times in 2010:

“Austerity in the capital budget is the worst possible remedy for a slump”.


I stick by that.

Now we come to the Laffer curve: lower taxes mean higher growth. To justify his claim, Jeremy Hunt produced the Laffer curve like a rabbit out of his hat. However, as the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, pointed out, there is no correlation over time between tax rates and growth rates. The most prosperous period in modern history was the three decades after the Second World War, when the highest marginal tax rates were at 90%, and literally no one was allowed to become a billionaire—even becoming a millionaire was quite difficult.

My last point is that although Labour has rightly been critical of this Budget, it occupies much of the same intellectual territory as the Conservative Government. It has been common territory since the Lawson revolution of the 1980s. It means that while the Conservatives offer what we might call old-fashioned supply-side policy, Labour offers new supply-side policy, which Rachel Reeves called “securonomics”. To my mind, it is a weak position, because it invites the question of where the money is to come from. Unless you believe there is a demand shortage, you cannot face that problem, and it has been followed by the withdrawal of the pledge to spend a large sum of money on green investment.

I remind the House that practical men are all slaves of economists—who said that? Economics will have to do better to provide a philosophical underpinning for public policy.

Budget Statement

Lord Skidelsky Excerpts

Thursday 16th March 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in paying tribute to the remarkable maiden speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Moyo. It was very thoughtful and thought provoking, and I very much appreciated her reference to me—she will have a great future here.

The Budget was crafted in the shadow of disruptive world events over which the Chancellor has little or no control, but it is by its effectiveness in tackling or responding to those events that I think this Budget will be judged. The three killer apps—as one might call them—are global finance, technology and geopolitics. The global banking crisis of course caused the depression of 2008-09. The recent collapse of SVB shows, as the noble Lord, Lord Fox, noted in this House on Tuesday, what a huge proportion of our tech industry depends on finance from a single foreign bank whose solvency in turn depends on fluctuations in interest and bond rates. That is one element of huge fragility in our system.

As for technology, it simply speeds up the operation of every single movement in the economy, whether beneficial or destructive. We know about geopolitics, which threatens all our supply chains and the future of the global economy. So those three elements are really beyond the control of a Budget or a Chancellor and, together, they make the world economy more dangerous, more unstable and more uncertain.

The Minister, in introducing the Statement, stuck closely to the forecasts—but how does she explain the ludicrous divergence in the OBR’s forecasts on inflation and growth between October/November 2022 and March 2023, or the divergence in forecasts between the Treasury and the Bank of England? The noble Lord, Lord Willetts, pointed out that these different models factor in different things, but which of the factorings lead to an outcome that we can have faith in? You factor this, you factor that. What is going on is that all the models used are inadequate. They have become inadequate in the face of large structural breaks which have been occurring in the economy as a result of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine. They are models which are still optimising around some long-forgotten equilibrium.

I am not sure that we have a better model, but it limits the confidence that we can have in these forecasts. They are trotted out almost as truths. The Chancellor said, “We will grow by” X, Y or Z per cent in the next three years, but what he meant was that the OBR model says that those will be the growth rates—and that is not a satisfactory basis for building confidence.

The speed-up of model obsolescence represents a huge break from the past. We were brought up to believe that short-term forecasts were relatively reliable—after all, how much could change in six months?—and that the longer ones were less reliable. Now, however, both are unreliable. It has infected both the short-term and long-term forecasts. The Treasury is not steering the economy—that phrase was the title of one of Sam Brittan’s great books. The economy is being tossed around by the world economy from one place to another, and that is not going away any time soon. These destructive events have wreaked havoc with the macroeconomic rules so laboriously constructed in the 1990s and 2000s, in particular that of the separation of fiscal and monetary policy, which was the architectural triumph of the Blair-Brown years.

What is it like today? What is the state of that separation today? The fact is that it has been fatally undermined. The Bank of England has been stoking up inflation when it was set up to do the exact opposite. It has been given a green mandate that conflicts with its inflation mandate, and no one knows exactly what the relationship is between fiscal and monetary policy. It has become hopelessly fuzzy, as we found out on the Economic Affairs Committee when we interviewed the Governor of the Bank of England. The whole relationship is shrouded in fictions that no one is meant to penetrate. That is not the basis for giving confidence in macroeconomic policy. In fact, the confidence has been withheld.

“Our plan is working”, said the Chancellor. What plan? To reduce inflation? To get growth? To reduce the inactivity rate? To achieve energy security? He must realise that any improvements that have been recorded since he became Chancellor, or in the last two or three months, are not due to anything the Treasury has done but result from what has been going on in the world economy. There have been beneficial developments, particularly what has happened to energy prices.

A remarkable thing about Budget making today is what it says about markets, media and policy networks. If you analyse it, you will find that there is actually very little difference between the Truss-Kwarteng and the Sunak-Hunt Budgets; the first just came at slightly the wrong time, that is all. Now, things have got a bit better. These are Budgets that depend on five-year forecasts; you cannot say that the difference of a month or two in the presentation of a Budget should have caused such panic in the market—unless, of course, no one had any real confidence in the long-term forecasts on which the Budgets were made.

At one time, there were things called “Budget leaks”. You were not meant to reveal what was in the Budget. In fact, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1947 resigned because of a Budget leak. Now, Budget leaks are routine; they are sort of trailers in which the Treasury lays out what it is going to do. What about the opportunities for speculation, for example, that that might give rise to? No one thinks about that any more. You have to make the newspaper headlines.

The Chancellor might have taken advantage in his Budget to display the beginnings of a coherent framework. There is one such framework—it is a very old model; no one knows about it any longer—called the balanced budget multiplier. That approach underpins the Biden Administration’s $738 billion Inflation Reduction Act, which was passed into law last year; I do not think that the Chancellor referred to it in his speech. It is based on an intelligent combination of extra investment and higher social spending to be paid for by higher taxes on the rich and the very rich. Split roughly half and half between tax and spending increases, the combined effect is forecast to secure—again, one has to make the point that it is a forecast—a cumulative reduction in the federal fiscal deficit of about $300 billion over five years. It may not happen—it probably will not—but at least there is a mechanism in it which suggests that it could happen. What we do not have in the present enthusiasm for the policy working is any mechanism or theory which gives you confidence that what the Chancellor is doing will achieve what he wants it to do.

I will make two final points—I am sorry that I have gone on a bit—about where we are in the cycle. It is very difficult to assess what is happening in the labour market; the noble Lord, Lord Bridges, talked about this. On the one hand, we have a very high inactivity rate of about 7 million altogether, which is usually connected with a slack labour market. On the other hand, we have unemployment very low at 3.7% and lots of job vacancies, which would suggest a tight labour market. What is the explanation of that puzzle? The truth, I think, is that headline unemployment figures no longer accurately measure the capacity utilisation of an economy; I think that that has been true for some time, but it has been brought to the forefront recently. A shortage of supply in some areas is combined with a general deficiency of demand in the economy. We would expect the latter to be the case, given that the economy has not grown for three years while the population has grown by 1 million and real wages have fallen substantially. Therefore, we would expect a deficiency of aggregate demand, even though there are pockets of shortage of supply. The Budget might have addressed its attention to that.

I wish that the Chancellor had argued in favour of job creation, rather than incentives to people to apply for jobs that do not exist. Gordon Brown and I, two years ago, argued for a public sector job guarantee scheme, which I still think would act as a kind of buffer stock of employment which would oscillate with the oscillations of the cycle. I am sorry that it was not adopted; it would have been—and still would be—a good method of job creation today that would also tie in with the devolution strategy.

My last point is about securing the long-term growth of the economy. Of course, I welcome the incentives that the Chancellor has provided for investment—the creation of 12 new investment zones modelled on becoming potential Canary Wharfs—but I wish he had given a bit more attention to two British institutions for investment, which I do not think that he mentioned: the UK Infrastructure Bank and the British Business Bank, both of which could be developed. As the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, said, we know that investment has been a problem in the British economy for a long time. We also know that the share of public investment in total investment has dropped dramatically, and it has not been compensated by any increase in private investment. Here is a good opportunity to insert the state into the long-term recovery of the economy and to provide for the energy and security autonomy, which is the aim of the Government and us all.

In short, there are quite a few interesting initiatives, but I do not think that they have been properly joined-up, and we still await a commanding framework for action in a world that is spinning out of control.

Autumn Statement 2022

Lord Skidelsky Excerpts

Tuesday 29th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

My Lords, the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement is designed to reassure the markets of the sustainability of the public finances. That is, the Chancellor accepts as binding the views of the City of London, whether they are right or wrong. It is what the markets think that matters, not how matters really are—a nice intrusion of post-modernist thinking in what is supposed to be the hard science of economic policy-making.

It is pretty obvious why the Government should pay such attention to the financial markets. For decades, the financial sector has propped up the UK’s hollowed-out economy. Financial flows into the City of London allowed the country to neglect production and trade and artificially maintain a higher standard of living than its productive capacity warranted. Now we are paying the price.

Instead of starting to repair this long-term damage, the Autumn Statement is designed to repair the so-called “black hole” in the budget, in the belief that doing so will, by some magical process, produce an automatic surge in output and growth. In other words, it concentrates on shrinking the numerator, the budget, while ignoring the effects of that shrinkage on the denominator, which is GDP growth. Even in terms of maintaining investor confidence, that is misguided, as the noble Lord, Lord Eatwell, pointed out. How does the Chancellor imagine foreign creditors reacting if his spending cuts produce, or deepen, a recession?

Politics should be based on some theory, at any rate, but there is no explicit theory to be found in either the Autumn Statement or the OBR forecast. The Chancellor sets fiscal targets to reassure the markets. The OBR is there to reassure the markets that the Government’s targets are consistent with its own forecasts. The Treasury and the watchdog cling to each other for mutual protection behind a barrage of statistics that claim far more than they are entitled to.

If there is an implicit model behind both Treasury targets and OBR forecasts, it is the one known as financial crowding-out. There is assumed to be a fixed supply of capital, so the Government’s increased demand for funds puts upward pressure on interest rates. The rise in interest rates will “crowd out” any stimulus afforded by additional borrowing. That is why the less the Government borrow, the more growth you will get. That is simply a restatement of the “Treasury view” of the 1920s, explained by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, who said that

“when the Government borrows in the money market it becomes a new competitor with industry and engrosses to itself resources which would otherwise have been employed by private enterprise, and in the process it raises the rent of money to all who have need of it.”—[Official Report, Commons, 15/4/29; col. 53.]

Presumably, Jeremy Hunt would subscribe to that hoary doctrine, though doubtless in less orotund language. It is as though the Keynesian revolution had never happened; we are just back to pre-Keynesian orthodoxy. It is all embellished in various ways and tweaked here and there, but the substance is exactly the same. However, as the economist Rob Calvert Jump wrote in a recent article:

“There is now a consensus amongst economists that austerity does significant damage to an economy’s potential, undermining growth, as the experience of the last decade in Britain has shown us. Further austerity will do far more damage than a ‘fiscal hole’ that disappears with tweaks to models or accounting rules. The ‘fiscal hole’ is a dangerous fiction compared to the hard facts of austerity’s impact.”


The last point is particularly worth emphasising. How many people realise that the notorious “fiscal black hole” is the product of shifting definitions of net public sector debt?

Theory alone cannot provide us with all the answers; in fact, all the macro models are in more or less of a mess. I will give three examples. The first is the rise in the inactivity rate. There has been a fall of 227,000 in employment since a year ago. So we have a tight labour market with unemployment at 3.6%, a strong demand for labour and a falling labour participation rate. How can that be explained?

Secondly, there is the notorious productivity puzzle. No one has much of a handle on this. What we know is that the forecasts suggest there will be a dramatic fall in living standards, by about 7.1% over the next two years. How will creating a depression stimulate enterprise, innovation or investment, which are the drivers of productivity?

Finally, inflation is expected to peak at 11% in the first quarter and then fall. Again, the discussion really makes no advance on the old discussion about the causes of inflation, whether due to excess demand or cost push—there are, of course, cost-push factors. I think everyone understands that the UK’s support of Ukraine has pushed up energy prices. That is why the Government are now explicitly asking the public to save energy to beat Putin, using crude, World War II-style “Dig for Victory” messaging. What is much less understood is that the UK has a special problem: gas is particularly expensive here, due to our chronic lack of gas storage and our inefficient and exploitative energy distributors.

To conclude, I am strongly in favour of balancing the budget, but not by any mixture of cutting spending and raising taxes. The approach I would favour in present circumstances revives the almost forgotten Keynesian idea of a balanced budget multiplier. A contemporary version of this would suggest a windfall tax or excess profits tax on energy producers, the proceeds of which would be spent by the Government on maintaining investment and consumer demand in the face of the economic downturn.

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[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I am not sure exactly which bit of what I said the noble Lord wants me to correct. I stated the Government’s record on economic growth since 2010, and I simply referred to the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Kramer, on the recession that was also experienced under the previous Labour Government.

I return to the subject of energy. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, asked about energy efficiency. Warmer homes and buildings are key to reducing bills, creating jobs along the way and meeting our targets on climate change. That is why we are committed to driving improvements in energy efficiency, with a new ambition to reduce the UK’s final energy consumption from buildings and industry by 15% by 2030. A new ECO+ installation scheme was announced earlier this week.

I disagree with the analysis that this is jam tomorrow; we have £6 billion of new government capital funding that will be made available from 2025 to2028, but that is in addition to the £6.6 billion allocated in this Parliament. The aim of that kind of longer-term projection of funding is to create consistency and allow businesses and the supply chain to build up and plan for the future, which can be something that we struggle with in the provision of energy efficiency measures. We are also launching the energy efficiency task force and expanding our public awareness campaign to help reduce bills for households and protect vulnerable people over the winter and beyond.

In response to my noble friend Lord Leigh of Hurley, on other tax measures and the taxation of US groups trading in the UK, the UK has long been committed to tackling base erosion and profit-shifting, which is why we introduced the diverted profits tax in 2015 and the corporation interest restriction rules in 2017. I am glad that he welcomed progress on Pillar 2, which we will legislate for in the spring 2023 Finance Bill, but I agree with him that we need to make further progress on Pillar 1. That is why we continue to work internationally on finalising Pillar 1, so that the corresponding multilateral convention can be ready for signature in the first half of 2023, allowing for implementation in 2024.

Other noble Lords noted some strange political alliances that seemingly might have formed in the course of this debate. The noble Lords, Lord Sikka and Lord Howarth of Newport, but also my noble friends Lord Bridges and Lady Noakes raised concerns around the Government’s decision to freeze the personal allowance and other tax thresholds. I say to noble Lords that despite the need to increase taxes—I fully acknowledge that freezing thresholds is a tax increase, I am not trying to hide it in any way—given that the personal allowance nearly doubled across the last decade, it will still be £2,150 higher by April 2028 than it would have been had it been uprated by inflation each year since 2010. The noble Lord, Lord Sikka, also asked about the distributional impacts of tax. I cannot answer his specific point, but on average it is households in the poorest income deciles that are gaining the most next year as a result of decisions taken in the Autumn Statement.

I take seriously the concerns expressed by my noble friends Lady Noakes and Lord Bridges. The Government have had to take difficult decisions and we are being honest about that. We want a low-tax economy, but first must come economic stability, and we need everyone to contribute a little towards sustainable public finances. I know it will be little comfort to them to be reminded that the UK tax system remains competitive, with the tax-to-GDP ratio meaning that we are still in the middle of the pack within the G7 and lower than such countries as France, Germany and Italy. As I say, the Government take their challenge on growth seriously and we have taken some tax decisions to prioritise this; for example, keeping the annual investment allowance level that was set in the growth plan permanently at £1 million, rather than reverting to £200,000 from 1 April 2023.

My noble friend Lord Bridges rightly identified a greater range of actions that we must take to set the conditions of growth beyond tax policy. A key area and opportunity post Brexit is regulation, and I hope he will welcome the action on Solvency II that we have announced and the measures in the forthcoming Financial Services Bill, which we will seek to replicate across other growth sectors across the UK economy, such as life sciences, as spoken about passionately by my noble friend Lady Blackwood. Many noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and my noble friend Lord Tugendhat, raised the issue of housing. The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, spoke about the need to build more houses for social rent: that is exactly what the Government are doing, through such measures as removing the cap on councils borrowing against their housing revenue account. I reassure him also that we are still committed to ending no-fault evictions.

My noble friend Lady Cumberlege asked about our commitment to community pharmacists and the issue of funding there. The plan for patients set out the further expanded role of pharmacies agreed in the community pharmacy contractual framework for the next two years, as well as an additional £100 million investment to recognise the pressures facing the sector. The Government have also committed to look further by enabling pharmacists with more prescribing powers and making more simple diagnostic tests available in community pharmacies.

In response to the noble Lord, Lord Rogan, I welcome the 25th anniversary of the Belfast agreement and I am extremely pleased that we confirmed in the Autumn Statement that we are funding the planned trade and investment event in Northern Ireland. DIT will work with local partners as this is taken forward, including with Invest NI.

The noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, asked about defence spending. As I said in my opening speech, we recognise the need to increase defence spending, but before we make announcements on that, we need to refresh the integrated review, which was drafted before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester referred to the benefit of women’s programmes for preventing female offending and the savings to the Ministry of Justice as a result. In September, the Ministry of Justice announced that almost £21 million will be invested in women’s services to tackle the causes of female offending and cut crime.

The noble Lord, Lord Livingston of Parkhead, asked an interesting question about the difference between the Bank of England and OBR forecasts. Given the number of recent changes in fiscal policy and the volatility in financial and energy markets, the range of external forecasts is wide. Differences will partly reflect when each forecast was produced and the differences in assumptions about government policy, interest rates and energy prices, but I take his wider point.

I congratulate my noble friend Lady Lea on her excellent maiden speech. I know she brings a wealth of economic experience, not least from her own time working in the Treasury. I look forward to working with her in the future.

We have faced two enormous shocks in the last three years. The pandemic has caused supply chain disruption, slowed growth and increased debt levels, and Putin’s war in Ukraine has caused energy prices to spike. This has added up to inflation at levels not seen in a generation, hitting the pockets of families across the country. That is why tackling inflation is our priority. It makes everyone worse off, especially the most vulnerable, so we have taken difficult decisions that will mean taxes go up and spending will not rise by as much as previously planned. When we take into account the need to invest more in areas such as our NHS, it means hard choices to be made elsewhere.

However, I remind noble Lords that we fight these economic challenges from a position of relative strength. Unemployment is close to the lowest level it has been in nearly 50 years, and the UK is forecast to have had the fastest growth in the G7 in 2022. We also have incredible strengths within our country that aid our mission: our teachers, our NHS workforce, our armed services, and everyone who works in our public sector—day in, day out—to deliver the services upon which we rely.

We are inventive and resourceful, and the innovative, intuitive and ambitious people who make up our private sector will drive our growth. Combine this with the decisions taken over the last 12 years and the results are clear to see: employment is up by millions compared to 2010; we have had the third highest real GDP growth rate in the G7 since 2010; renewable energy production is growing faster than in any other large country in Europe since 2010; thousands more children are in good and outstanding schools compared to 2010; and we have record numbers of doctors in the NHS. Now, because of the difficult decisions we take in our plan, we are strengthening our public finances, bearing down on inflation and supporting jobs—all while protecting public services.

The Autumn Statement is a plan that provides stability. It is a plan for growth and a plan for public services. I beg to move.

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

Before the noble Baroness sits down, could I ask a question, please?

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

Excuse me, but before the noble Baroness sits down, she did not answer my questions, unless I fell asleep, which is quite possible because it is past my bedtime. I asked two specific questions about NHS funding and hospitals.

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[Baroness Penn (Con)]

There were many questions that noble Lords asked that I did not get to in the time available. Maybe I should write to all those who have participated in this debate to make sure that I address all the points raised but do not detain noble Lords any further.

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

Could the Minister explain how fiscal consolidation, particularly cutting public spending, promotes growth?

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, there is probably a longer conversation to be had, but I did set out how the profile that we have taken in our approach to consolidation supports growth at this time but also gets our public finances on to a sustainable footing. I am now sitting down; I will take no further interventions.

Budget Statement

Lord Skidelsky Excerpts

Tuesday 14th March 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

My Lords, I always seem to follow the noble Lord, Lord Desai, or he follows me, in these debates. Like terrible twins, we cannot be separated. He is always fun to listen to and has given us a lot to think about, although I shall not follow him on this occasion down the path of secular stagnation, which is certainly worth thinking about.

Ever since I entered this debate eight years ago, I have said that the austerity policy was wrong—that it would slow down growth, and therefore make it impossible for Chancellors to meet their targets. I do not think that I was wrong. As Larry Elliott wrote last week:

“A one-term deficit reduction plan has now become a 15-year slog”,


and it will no doubt go on.

True enough, public sector net borrowing has fallen from 9.7% of GDP in 2010-11 to 3.8% this year, and is expected to fall to 0.7% in 2021-22, but this reduction is not the result of any measures taken or cuts made by George Osborne; it is the result solely of the growth of the economy, which is due to a different set of factors of which monetary policy has been very important. This is a difficult issue, but one cannot have this debate without a tiny bit of economic theory being somewhere buried in its recesses, and I want to produce my little smidgeon.

What has happened is that growth policy, such as it was, has been outsourced to monetary policy since 2010. This is by far the weaker of the two instruments, because of the slippage between printing money and spending money which was discerned by Lord Keynes in 1936. In other words, you can print the money; the problem is to get it spent. If there are leakages on the way, there will be quite a weak impact.

The net impact of fiscal contraction and monetary expansion has been to slow down the rate of growth of the economy. Everyone now recognises this, except of course the Front Bench on the government side. Everyone recognises that austerity policies have slowed down the rate of growth of the British economy. Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, said in his recent Roscoe Lecture that,

“sustained austerity … has, on average, subtracted around 1 percentage point from demand each year”,

since 2010. That is not a unique statement; we hear it from official bodies as well. Had George Osborne simply continued with the policies of his Labour predecessor, he would have left his own successor, Mr Hammond, with a nice surplus by now.

It is a bit disturbing to see that the penny has not yet dropped. The austerity rhetoric seems to be hardwired into the minds of Chancellors, although their practice is somewhat different from their rhetoric, but it is more disturbing to see that it seems to be hardwired into the minds also of Treasury officials. Two representatives of the Treasury view have spoken today, the noble Lords, Lord Macpherson and Lord Higgins—the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, was brought up and bred in the Keynesian era, so he is a bit more relaxed about these things.

Over these years, someone has been getting something wrong. Is it the Chancellors? Is it the Treasury? Is it the OBR? Is it the economics profession? I blame the economics profession quite largely for these wrong models of the economy, but the truth seems to be that all macroeconomic forecasting policy models were wrong, because the theory on which they were based was wrong. At least the IMF has admitted that it was wrong, but I do not see any admission from the Treasury to that effect. The Treasury, after all, has never been interested in growth; it is the Government’s housekeeper. That is why Harold Wilson set up the Department of Economic Affairs in 1964 as a counterweight to the Treasury view. Who now remembers it? Very few. It ran aground on the sterling crises of that era, but it is certainly something Governments should look at again.

The Chancellor followed many of his predecessors in mentioning the productivity question. How come the UK’s productivity is 18% lower than the average of G7 countries? It is not such a puzzle. In every single year between 1980 and 2015, Britain’s investment share of GDP was 3.7% lower than the G7 average. This level of underinvestment over a 25-year period is bound to produce a depressing productivity record.

The private sector is not picking up the slack. As Martin Wolf wrote last week, consumption in the last year rose by 3%, but investment fell by 1.5%. Chancellors have tried to help investment and I welcome some of the measures, but the amounts pledged have not reversed the cuts in the capital budget that have occurred since 2010.

Our infrastructure quality is ranked as the second worst in the G7. I must finish now, because the noble Lord, Lord Desai, said everything that I wanted to say about the burdens on our future generations and did so extremely well. But now that we have bond yields that are near rock bottom, we should take advantage of them to build a better Britain and not go on about deficit targets which present policy puts perpetually beyond reach.