Autumn Budget 2024

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, I am glad to follow the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, because he reminds us that solving the economic and fiscal problems of the country requires solving the economic and fiscal problems of local government and its services, of which social care is one of the biggest. That needs to be part of the Government’s economic strategy.

I congratulate the Minister on giving us such a coherent introduction; I add my congratulations to his boss, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who gave a bravura speech, which I listened to in full the other day. She has given the country at least a sense of direction and hope, even though there are some details that the House has demanded.

I warn the Minister that I was going to focus entirely on the areas I disagree with or feel need revisiting. But I was so provoked by the lead spokesperson for the Opposition being so blind and in a sense of denial and misrepresentation about the inheritance we have received. There was the whole period of austerity, followed by ludicrous claims about Brexit and then serious increases in taxation for businesses and individuals. The legacy we have had is a very difficult one for Treasury Ministers and the Cabinet to deal with, and this Budget makes only a start on that. As the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, emphasised, it has to be paralleled with other key strategies, two of which I have a particular interest in. One of them is environmental and the other is on equality.

My noble friend Lady Lister talked about the equality impact of this Budget, particularly in the social security system. I agree with her about some of the measures that are implied in this Budget in relation to the winter fuel arrangements and the two-child limit. I feel those both need to be revisited by the Government at some time during the next few years, if not immediately in this Budget or the next.

On the environmental side, I welcome the allocations to what are basically green projects and support for green energy but, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, who is no longer in his place, and others have said, the interventions on transport seem completely wrong. The previous Government were completely wrong in freezing fuel duty when we have a problem. I was on the committee that recently reported to your Lordships on the difficulty of changing to electric vehicles; that is not helped by the freezing of fuel duty on fossil fuels. We need to do the opposite and raise fossil fuel duty while encouraging the uptake of electric cars to reduce congestion and the air quality effects of fossil fuel emissions.

If we are moving in the wrong direction on the environment in certain key aspects, we need to review the basis of taxation policy in transport as a whole, as others have referred to. That needs to be part of the project for the next five years.

We also need to look at the basis of local authority finance. There are local authorities up and down the land, of all political persuasions and sizes—from regional mayors down to local town councils and so forth—who get nothing from this Budget. We need a new, solid and growing basis for financing the services that are delivered through local authorities. Unless the Treasury is prepared to look at that in real detail over the next few years—starting with a spending review this year and hopefully subsequent Budgets—we will not be able to deliver not only social care but most of the services to which people have referred, including education, that are so vital to sustaining the growth strategy.

So, this is a good start on a growth strategy, but it needs a lot more solid allocations to other strategies. In particular, it requires us to address the growing inequality that has persisted in our land over the last few years, and at the same time to address the problems of the environment which are threatening our whole world.