Future Government Spending

Adam Afriyie Excerpts

Wednesday 4th March 2015 Commons Chamber

[Andy Sawford]

My hon. Friend is right. The effect of low and stagnant pay means that tax receipts have been much lower than expected. The Government have failed on the deficit and the cost of living crisis. Low pay is combining with higher housing costs and the failure to deliver benefit reform to drive down social security costs, which are rising under this Government. The Tory-led Government are set to spend £25 billion more on social security than they planned in 2010. We need action on the issues that our constituents are facing.

In my area it is not just zero-hours exploitation that causes insecurity, and many people are working through agencies. They come off the books of the jobcentre to work for an agency. That work might last days, weeks, or a few months if they are lucky, and sometimes they get exploited working year in, year out through an agency without holiday pay or proper terms and conditions—desperately insecure employment. Although a few agencies follow the law, when HMRC investigated agencies in my constituency they found more than 70 breaches of the law, and £120,000 owing to local workers in non-payment of the minimum wage. People were being made to pay to get their own pay through payroll companies, or they had to pay illegally for their own protective equipment. That is the real world that many people face in my constituency and across the country.

[Adam Afriyie (Windsor) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Andy Sawford]

I have no more time. The Prime Minister said that he would name and shame those companies. A year ago he made me that promise at the Dispatch Box during Prime Minister’s questions, in front of the whole House and the country. It was on the front page of my local paper, but a year on he still has not named and shamed those local companies. The people in my area do not know which of these agencies is most likely to rip them off.

What about the second part of the Government’s promise: that we are all in this together? They promised us that they would not balance the budget on the back of the poor. They cut the 50p rate to 45p, handing a £3 billion tax cut to the richest 1%. They handed people earning £1 million a tax cut of more than £42,000 a year, while cutting council tax support for war widows and the disabled. They imposed the deeply unfair bedroom tax, which has had the direct result of driving many people into the queues at the food banks in my constituency and across the country. I want to thank Hope church for its brilliant work, which I try to support. The people of Corby have been brilliant. The food bank ran out of stocks recently. We put out an appeal and within 24 hours it was full again. However, people in this country, one of the wealthiest countries in the world, should not have to rely on food banks. That is Tory Britain.

Since 2010, there have been 24 Tory tax rises. Ordinary families are paying £450 a year more in VAT. Figures from the IFS show that households will on average be more than £1,000 a year worse off by the time of the next general election. This is the first Government to lower living standards during their time in office. It gets worse: because of their failure and their dogma—the Tory party tried to stop the NHS being created in the first place—they are now planning to take us back to a time before the NHS existed, to a 1930s level of spending.

At the coming election, there will be a very stark choice. Under Tory plans, the state will shrink from 41% now to 35% by the end of the next Parliament. That is the lowest level since 1939, before the NHS existed and when children left school at the age of 14. That is the equivalent of cutting every penny we spend on schools, half the budget of our NHS, and more than all the Departments’ capital budgets added together, including what we spend on investment in schools, hospitals, roads, railways, housing, science and flood defences.

People in my constituency know that I have been fighting very hard to try to stop cuts to the local fire service and to keep Sure Start centres open. The children’s centre in Raunds has just closed. Our police stations are threatened: the front desk at Oundle has just closed and Corby police station is threatened with closure. We have had cuts to our ambulance services. Last week, the captain of Corby Town football club broke his leg in two places and dislocated his ankle. An ambulance was called at 8.10 pm. It came at 11.10 pm.

That is what has happened in the first five years of a Tory Government. People know what will happen in the next five years of a Tory Government. Our NHS will be completely decimated, as our social care services have been in this Parliament. People in my constituency and across the country cannot afford five more years of this rotten Tory Government.

[Oliver Colvile (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Con)]

First, may I thank the Opposition very much indeed for securing this debate? This is one of the most important issues that we need to discuss between now and 7 May. I congratulate my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Treasury team on controlling public expenditure and making progress on reducing the deficit. I do that not only as a Member of Parliament but principally as a taxpayer. I do not particularly want to see my mortgages go up because we have a Labour Government.

I first raised this issue during the 2001 general election campaign, the first of the three times that I have fought my Plymouth seat. At a meeting of the Plymouth chamber of commerce, I pointed out to then Labour MP that the then Chancellor’s Red Book clearly stipulated that the Government would be creating a structural budget deficit. My predecessor looked somewhat blankly at me and did not appear to be familiar with the Treasury’s Red Book. At the 2005 election when I talked about this again, she seemed to have become a little more familiar with the Red Book. I was told that the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) always got his sums right and that I was just scaremongering. Well, I just have to ask one question: “Oh, really?”

I would like to pay tribute to Warwick Lightfoot, a very good friend of mine and a former special adviser at the Treasury. He has provided me with the intelligence and ammunition in the past 15 years to deal with these issues. Soon after my election in 2010, with his help, I submitted a paper on my thoughts about the strategic defence and security review. I made it quite clear that while I recognised the need to control the public expenditure envelope, I named my spending priorities as defence and long-term care for the elderly. Representing a naval garrison city, I have in the past five years consistently called on the Government to spend at least 2% of GDP on defence. This could be achieved by taking the renewal of the nuclear deterrent out of the defence budget and returning it to the Treasury.

I am grateful that the seven Type 23 frigates that the previous Labour Government had proposed to send to Portsmouth have been returned to Plymouth, and I am delighted that HMS Protector has been sent from Portsmouth to Devonport. It is good to have another ship there.

[Adam Afriyie]

My hon. Friend is a powerful advocate for his constituents and has won some great concessions on their behalf in his time here. Does he share my concern—in a way, it is a sadness—that Labour does not seem to have learned anything in the past four or five years? It calls for more spending regardless of whether there is a budget surplus or deficit. If it continued spending as it would like, this country would be back on its knees in the blink of an eye.

[Oliver Colvile]

My hon. Friend talks the truth about the importance of our controlling public expenditure.

Over the past five years, I have worked closely with Plymouth university’s Ian Sherriff on long-term care for the elderly and combating dementia, which is something I know my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister takes very seriously. For those in our mid-50s and facing old age, the worry is that we will get dementia, so I pay tribute to the Government for implementing the vast majority of the Dilnot report. We have much further to go, but it is a start. Unfortunately, the previous Labour Government did not do much about implementing their royal commission.

Another incredibly important issue in my constituency is the rebalancing of Plymouth’s low-waged, low-skilled economy. More than 38% of people working in the city are employed by the public sector, and when I was first elected, people believed that Plymouth would be badly hit by, and vulnerable to, the cuts to public expenditure, and there was the threat of the claimant count in the city going through the roof, but I am delighted to say that under this Government the count has fallen by 42%.

The city council has criticised me for voting to control public expenditure, claiming that the Government have not invested in the south-west, but it fails to recognise that they have given Plymouth and the peninsula a city deal that, in return for £10 million, will create 10,000 new jobs. It fails to acknowledge that releasing land in South Yard will deliver a marine industry campus and create 1,200 new jobs—this would be helped significantly by an enterprise zone in South Yard as well. It fails to acknowledge that they have given us the Mayflower 2020 commemorations, which will boost the local tourist industry, and the council has disregarded the £2.6 billion investment in our dockyard, which will safeguard 4,000 new jobs, and dismissed the dualling of the A303 after the next election.

The biggest threat to my city over the next few weeks would be the return of a Labour Government, because, unfortunately, a Labour Government would never think about Plymouth—they would be much more interested in looking after Scotland at Plymouth’s expense. Following the 1997 election, when Tony Blair won his landslide, Labour had only four seats in the whole of Devon and Cornwall, meaning they did not invest in transport or skills there. I fear that Labour would put this investment into Scotland at our expense and would not deliver on Mayflower 400.

We need a stronger Navy. We need to put pressure on the Government for more funds to fix our potholes, in addition to the £9.6 million the council has been given over the past five years, and we need to restore our maritime built heritage, particularly Devonport’s north corner pontoon and sea wall. If we want to ensure that Drake’s drum does not sound, we need the Prime Minister back in No. 10 and a Conservative Chancellor making the right decisions.