Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Lord Tyrie and John Redwood

Wednesday 16th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Tyrie]

I am not going to put the right hon. Gentleman under any pressure.

The Chancellor deserves a great deal of credit for the recovery, and I have said so before; so does the Prime Minister—he has just slipped out of the Chamber—who has backed the Chancellor, I think, for the most part. The last six years have been extremely difficult at times, and it is a defining achievement for the Government that they have led the country out of the worst crisis in modern history and that they are now stabilising the public finances, which looked, and indeed were, completely out of control in 2010. We should not forget the scale of the challenge that beset the then coalition Government.

The Chancellor has talked about storm clouds gathering. I think he called it a “cocktail of risks”, coming particularly from abroad. He is certainly right about that. Emerging markets are slowing down, capital markets are faltering and the eurozone is edging back towards a serious crisis. If all that is sustained, the UK economy is going to take a hit. Of course, as the Office for Budget Responsibility has pointed out, the uncertainty in the short term about the EU referendum will not help either. We have seen all that reflected in the OBR’s forecasts, particularly on productivity. The Chancellor is right to be extremely cautious.

If I get time, I will say something briefly about the fiscal rules, and their merits or otherwise; there are some problems with the fiscal rules. I will also say whether fiscal policy should be so frequently adjusted to take account of forecasts as a consequence. I might say something, if I get time, about the way in which Budget measures are advertised so far in advance, which I am not sure is at all helpful.

First, I want to answer one central criticism of the recovery that is now under way—we did not hear so much of that from the Leader of the Opposition, although there were hints of it from time to time—and that is the assertion that the UK is in the grip of an unsustainable debt-driven, consumption-led recovery. Frankly, the statistics do not support that. Of course, one might say that the statistics are not worth much, because they have come from the Office for National Statistics and other sources, and we have discovered that they are of very little merit. Sir Charlie Bean is trying to improve statistics. They are the only figures we have got, however, and on the basis of the figures we have got, that claim, which is certainly widely made, does not hold up.

Investment has contributed a third of the total growth since the depths of the recession in the middle of 2009, despite accounting for only one seventh of GDP in recent years; that is the figure for the past five years. Debt as a proportion of household income has remained well below crisis levels, and recently productivity and real wage growth, which are the hallmarks of a sustainable recovery, are also showing signs of a pick up—something that the Chancellor did not emphasise in his speech—so I do not think that that argument holds up. Even if it were true that the recovery was very uneven as a consequence, that is what I would expect. The bigger the shock—this was a very big shock, the biggest in modern economic history—the more uneven the recovery is likely to be. Growth returns only a result of a fundamental reallocation of capital after a major crisis and more efficient use of that capital in the places to which it goes.

That process, this time, has been made particularly difficult by a profound weakness of the banking system. Firms, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, appear unable to obtain the capital they need to invest and grow even now. Again, that is something that the Chancellor did not emphasise. Although it is true that the average rate of interest for new advances is not very high—around 4%—the total stock of outstanding loans to SMEs tells its own story. It is falling, and has been falling pretty steadily for several years, even though the economy is recovering. That suggests that SMEs are not able, perhaps because of some form of rationing, to get the money that they need to grow and to sustain economic activity. That is a question that we need to come back to in the context of banking reform. Above all, we need desperately to get much more banking competition into the SME market and into the retail banking market.

I said that I would query the fiscal rules, and I am going to do so, as indeed has the Treasury Committee in an earlier report. The Chancellor was able to show a good deal of flexibility when it mattered in the last Parliament. His fiscal rules provided him with a good deal of leeway to adjust policy in response to the euro crisis, which was a heck of a shock to adjust to. He recently imposed three new restrictions on himself. First, there is this new surplus rule. Then there is the ring-fencing of three quarters of public spending. Now we also have the tax lock, which prevents rises in VAT, national insurance and income tax, which collectively account for three quarters of tax revenue.

Making fiscal rules all began with the efforts of Tony Blair and the former right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath to restore credibility to Labour’s economic policy in the 1990s. Since 1997—I have taken a look at the fiscal rules and if somebody wants me to go through them all, I will, but that will only delay the House—I have worked out that we have had six, so the average life of those fiscal rules has been three and a half years. I am afraid that the record of this Government and the coalition Government is no better than that of their predecessors; actually, it is somewhat worse. There is some merit in the Government’s giving guidance to markets and the public about their intentions, particularly their long-term and strategic intentions, but the rules have been presented, as their names suggest, as something far more permanent. They are called guarantees, rules, mandates, charters or pledges. Of course, as each one has been broken, it has not done much for the quality of politics and political discourse, and it has not done anything for economic credibility. The Government’s fiscal credibility does not derive from the rules or the mandates; it comes from the fact that they have tackled the deficit and have got it down from 10% to about 3% or a bit more.

Parties on both sides of the House now have fiscal rules. The new Labour shadow Chancellor—I do not think he is new Labour himself, but he is the recently appointed shadow Chancellor—has recently come up with one of his own. Both parties are at it, but I do not think the rules of either of them are offering much.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Is not one of the problems faced by any Government the fact that the so-called independent forecasts by the OBR and the Bank of England are always wrong and that they are always changing them? Those forecasts can have more of an impact on the Budget than common-sense judgments about where the economy is going, because we are always dealing with the errors of the OBR.

[Mr Tyrie]

That is exactly the point I was coming on to make. We have just seen that the Chancellor has been forced to adjust his short-term policy to take account of what the OBR is now saying. He has altered his plans of only four months ago, and so long as the rule remains in place, he will have to do so again after the next fiscal event. That is mainly why the Treasury Committee concluded—the Leader of the Opposition did not give the whole quote—that it was

“not convinced that the surplus rule is credible in its current form.”

There is merit in something that can give some guidance, but it must be something less than one of these cast-iron rules that turn out to be so brittle they get smashed the first time there is a problem.

There are the public expenditure rules. On public expenditure, the Government have ring-fenced about three quarters of public spending—health, schools, defence, international aid, pensions and child benefit. That is a heck of a lot. I will give an illustration of the effect of doing that. The Chancellor said that he needs to find only 50p in every £100, which I think he said will come mainly from value-for-money savings across the public spending framework. In fact, of course, three quarters of that framework is ring-fenced, so he really needs to get £2 in every £100 from the quarter from which he can raise it.

Then there is the tax rule. It says that the Government are committed, in law, not to increase VAT, income tax or national insurance contributions, which collectively amount to three quarters of Government revenue. I voted for that piece of declaratory legislation. I am not very keen on declaratory legislation, but I went through the Lobby for it. I must say, speaking personally—not on behalf of the Treasury Committee—that I would much rather have voted for legislation that prohibited Chancellors from tying their hands behind their backs in such a way, and I would like to limit hypothecation at the same time.

I will not detain the House for very much longer, except to say that the Budget measures will need very careful examination by the Treasury Committee. There is certainly quite a bit to examine, as there usually is every year. As the son of a shopkeeper, I cannot be anything but delighted to hear what has been said about class 2 national insurance contributions and small business rate relief. Although I will take a close look at that, it sounds as though that is exactly what is required. The reduction in corporation tax to 17% should not be underestimated. I would not mind betting that we will get some more revenue from that, quite independently of the anti-avoidance measures that are being pushed through.

The sugar tax has been limited to fizzy drinks and soft drinks. Speaking personally, if we are going to have a tax based on sugar, I wonder whether we should not consider widening that base in the longer run. After all, it is not just the sugar in drinks that is held to be harmful. Whether we always want to define tax bases on health grounds is another matter, but that bridge has been crossed now that such a levy has been introduced.

There are the cuts to the capital gains tax rates, the lifetime ISAs—they look very interesting and are certainly worth examining carefully—and of course the changes to income tax thresholds. There are quite a few other things, but those are the main ones for now. There is a lot for the Treasury Committee to examine with all this. We will get at it in the coming weeks and produce a report for consideration during the passage of the Finance Bill. There are quite a number of colleagues from the Committee in the Chamber at the moment.

We will score all the tax measures against whether they make the tax system simpler or more complex. We will reduce that assessment, on the basis of technical advice from the leading authorities in the field, to a number. Simplification is a mantra: everybody says we must have a simpler tax system, and every year Tolley’s tax guide expands. We must now, much more rigorously, start to create the conditions in which we can reverse that process. One of them is to flag up just how much more complex the tax system is becoming.

We will look carefully at the distributional impact of the measures. I regret that the Chancellor decided to change the basis of the assessment that the Government agreed to produce on the distributional effects. He originally, and very helpfully, published that in 2010, but he changed it in 2015, which I regret. We will look at that issue. Continuity of method, which he agreed to in evidence to us, is absolutely crucial.

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Lord Tyrie and John Redwood

Wednesday 19th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Andrew Tyrie (Chichester) (Con)]

It is my job to take away the political punchbowl, just as the party was just getting going. What we have just heard is the most difficult speech that anybody has to make in the House of Commons, and I am sure we will all read it with interest.

First, I should like to say a few words in a personal capacity about what has been announced on savings. They look extremely interesting and long-term reforms. For a start, the ISA reform is resonant of PEPs; that goes right back to the beginning, as those introduced the savings allowance. It was a tremendous idea. I am really pleased that the cash and equity ISAs have been merged and that we have raised the cap. The Treasury Committee will have to look at the provisions. I hope I will not have to come to the House and say that it has a different view.

Getting rid of the defined contribution rules that force people into annuities is a tremendous achievement—a very far-sighted announcement. The last Labour Government were also looking at that for a while, but they could not find a way to do it. This Chancellor has found a way to do it, and we should commend him for that.

Before I say a few words about some of the other measures in the light of past Treasury Committee recommendations, I should like to say a few personal words about the deficit. When the Chancellor set out his initial Budget judgment on behalf of the new coalition, many thought that the coalition would collapse—that the political strains of implementing spending cuts would be too great and shake the coalition Government apart. Well, the opposite has been the case. The coalition has stuck with it and the deficit reduction plan has become the cement of the coalition.

Both sides deserve credit for the fact that the coalition is still going and dealing with the deficit. Particular credit goes to the Liberal Democrats. If I may say so—I hope they do not mind—I never thought they had it in ’em. But they have, and they have stuck with it.

[Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Tyrie]

May I make a bit of progress?

The deficit is down from the stratospherically high figure of 11% of gross domestic product to just below 7%, and next year it is forecast to fall to 5%, as we have just heard announced by the Office for Budget Responsibility. The consolidation is already significant. It has been achieved despite a massive external shock which was not built into the forecast four years ago and which I do not think the Chancellor mentioned—the eurozone crisis and the economic stagnation in our largest export markets. It was primarily that crisis that forced the deficit reduction plan to fall behind schedule. The key question for the Government a couple of years ago was whether to relax fiscal policy sharply in response to the almost 4% loss of forecast GDP, most of which was a consequence of the eurozone crisis.

Rightly, in my view, the Government showed considerable flexibility within the overall framework, in two important ways. First, they authorised the Bank of England broadly to double the quantitative easing programme; and secondly, equally importantly, the so-called economic stabilisers—the falls in tax receipts and rises in public expenditure that come with lower growth—were allowed to kick in.

To give an idea of the importance of the stabilisers and QE on policy, it is worth reminding ourselves of the numbers. Since the election, an additional £175 billion has been put into the economy through QE and £140 billion has been put in through the automatic stabilisers. The latter figure is based on Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates; no one knows exactly, but it is of that order of magnitude. These are very large numbers. That showed flexibility by the Government.

[Mr Redwood]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Government’s flexibility included putting public spending up every year in cash terms over the period and relying on higher tax receipts to get the deficit down, which is how they maintained political agreement to the policy?

[Mr Tyrie]

I do not know about the political agreement point, but of course the effects of the stabilisers operate on both the tax and the spending sides. I think the Government were right to do what they did.

The Government have also been right to see off calls fundamentally to alter fiscal policy by sharply relaxing deficit reduction and increasing public spending. One of the main reasons it was important that they did not listen to those calls is that credibility in fiscal policy is hard won. It is built up over time—over many years—and it can easily be squandered. The Government resisted that temptation.

I will say a few words about the historical context. Looking to the 1930s, when stagnation set in and the agony was prolonged, partly because automatic stabilisers were suppressed and partly because far from engaging in QE, the then coalition Government did exactly the opposite: they lengthened the maturity of the debt and sucked money out of the economy. That is why the 1930s were so painful.

Now that we have a recovery, some are complaining that it is not the one we ordered. They complain that the recovery is consumer-led or uneven across sectors, regions and income groups. Well, of course it is. All recoveries of any value trigger a reallocation of resources, and therefore all recoveries change the shape of the economy. A recovery rarely takes root where the jobs were lost or the firms failed; it was ever thus and it will be the same this time. As the Chancellor stressed in his speech, jobs are being created at a record rate, but we cannot expect those jobs to be in exactly the same places as the jobs lost in the downswing. I am confident that, as in all previous recoveries, if we can sustain this recovery—and even if it is uneven, as it will be—it will, in time, deepen and spread through the whole economy. The figures for previous upswings support that.

The crucial question now, though, will be whether we can sustain the deficit reduction plan. A threat to deficit reduction will come from siren voices who say, “With the recovery under way, we can go back to spending money we haven’t got.” We are already hearing that. We need to remind ourselves that we are still spending about £7 for every £6 we collect in tax. It is true that we are in better shape, but with a deficit of about 6.6% of GDP, as the Chancellor announced today, we will remain vulnerable to economic shocks unless we do more to tackle it.

Another risk to deficit reduction is one of simple arithmetic caused by ring-fencing—something that the Treasury Committee has flagged up on several occasions. It will become increasingly difficult to find cuts to an ever-shrinking share of non-ring-fenced departmental spending. In other words, with ring-fencing of nearly half departmental expenditure, finding these savings will get tougher year by year. The Chancellor has argued, rightly, that polling evidence shows that that ring-fencing reflects public preferences. I think that is true for health and education, but it is not supported in the area of overseas aid. Spending on aid has risen by over a third in real terms and will rise even more because it is linked to GDP. Politics always points to ever-more ring-fencing; economics to less. Eventually, ring-fencing will have to be revisited, however difficult it is for all political parties.

Perhaps I should say a little about the risks—

Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between Lord Tyrie and John Redwood

Tuesday 22nd June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Andrew Tyrie (Chichester) (Con)]

It falls to me to respond just as everybody quite reasonably goes off for a bite to eat. I commiserate with the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) about having to respond to the Budget without a chance to absorb it, although I must say that that showed in some of the things she said. She made the best of a very weak hand, but a couple of points must be borne in mind. I shall say this as best I can without partisanship.

First, all three parties were committed at the last election to sharp cuts in spending. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Labour was planning about £45 billion-worth of cuts, which, because of ring-fencing, would have had to fall on only four main areas: education, defence, transport and housing. To give people an idea of the scale, defence spending is only about £40 billion, so massive adjustments would have had to be made by Labour, but that did not seem to feature in anything the right hon. and learned Lady said.

A second point that needs to be made is that we went into the recession carrying a huge structural deficit. Again, the right hon. and learned Lady did not acknowledge that at all. That deficit developed as a result of over-ambitious spending over many years by the previous Government, particularly by the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown). It simply had to be tackled; it could not have been left unaddressed. It really is not correct to attribute most of the tightening we need now to the mistakes of banks, the global recession or, as she has suggested today, to coalition ideology. The overwhelming majority of people who have looked at this have concluded that we must take early action to curb the huge, burgeoning deficit.

[Mr John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it was a disgraceful performance by the acting leader of the Labour party to accept no responsibility for the disgraceful state of the public accounts, and to dare to say that we wanted to cut when Labour was going to have to cut?