Budget Resolutions

Alan Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dehenna Davison (Bishop Auckland) (Con)]

I want to start by paying tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), who is no longer in his place, for making the strong case for why low-tax conservatism is the right way forward. Everyone on this side of the House can definitely agree with that, but we obviously have to face the reality that we are living in unprecedented times and that covid has had an enormous impact. On those grounds, I think that the Budget that was announced on Wednesday was really fantastic, and I want to go through some of the really positive things that were announced.

The first, which was also raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Plymouth, Moor View (Johnny Mercer), is the universal credit taper. Changing that to the 55% limit that it was originally destined to be is a really positive step forward in terms of not just the buzzwords of making work pay, which we Conservatives always talk about, but what that actually means for the single mum who knows that she can pick up a few more hours at work without losing a high proportion of her benefit. This has real-world implications for people, and it is a really positive step that this Conservative Government are taking.

I also want to focus on criminal justice, which is an area incredibly close to my heart—

[Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Dehenna Davison]

I will not, because I have moved on from that point.

I particularly want to look at what the Conservative Government are doing to tackle the courts backlog. The courts have been really damaged by covid and it is absolutely right that we are putting so much emphasis on this: not just on the courts backlog in and of itself but on extra funding for rehabilitation and for our prison services, as well as for victim support, which again is an area close to my heart.

Another area that is close to my heart, colleagues across the House will not be surprised to hear, is the hospitality sector, which has faced a crippling 18 months so far. It has had unprecedented support from the Government through business grants and the VAT reduction, and one of the things that is going to do wonders for the sector as it bounces back is the further reduction in business rates to be rolled out over the next 12 months. That is a really positive step that I am incredibly pleased to support today.

Something that I know caused vast cheers on Wednesday was the fact that we are finally seeing substantial changes to the alcohol duty system. This is long overdue, not just because it is going to help the brewing sector and the hospitality sector but because it is a form of tax simplification, which is something that I, as a low-tax Conservative, am wholeheartedly for. My inner low- tax Tory let out a massive cheer when I learned that fruit ciders were going to see a reduction in duty as well.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)]

As politicians, we should always try to understand the argument from the other side. On that basis, at great risk to myself, I will try to look at the Budget and recent announcements through the prism of a Scottish Tory. That means, first, that I have to ignore the 2014 promises on pensions, when it was said that voting no on the referendum was the best way to protect your pension. It means ignoring those promises and then voting for what is now going to be a £6 billion-a-year clawback from pensioners. As the Red Book shows, £30 billion over the next few years is getting taken from the pockets of our pensioners. It seems the Tories are not content with just ignoring the WASPI—Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign—women but are determined to make what is already one of the worst pensions in the developed world even worse.

If I am a Scottish Tory, I need to ignore that, and I need to ignore the £20-a-week cut to universal credit, but I will take great delight in demanding to know what the Scottish Government will do with the £41 million household support grant Barnett money that came our way after the universal credit cut. Let us put that money in context: each UC claimant is losing over £1,000 a year. The £41 million that comes back to Scotland, if distributed on a per capita basis, equates to a one-off payment of £85 per claimant. Yet we are supposed to be grateful for a £500 million cut being offset with £41 million.

If I am a Scottish Tory, I need to ignore the fact that as a group the Scottish Tories secured absolutely nothing from the Chancellor in the Budget. Instead of asking hard questions about why the Scottish carbon capture and storage cluster was overlooked again, I have to pretend I am really happy that the Scottish cluster is now a reserve. If ever there were a metaphor for the Union, the fact that Scottish Tories are happy for the Scottish cluster to be classed as a reserve is it. That is our place in the Union as it is.

The Scottish Tories have always been silent on the fact that Scotland has the highest grid charges in Europe. They have been silent about the £350 billion of oil and gas revenues that the broad shoulders of the UK have helped to spend without creating a sovereign wealth fund. They are silent about nothing being added to the Budget that matches the Scottish Government’s £500 million low-carbon just transition fund for the north-east of Scotland.

Because of the higher oil and gas prices, the Treasury is getting an unexpected windfall from the oil and gas revenues accrued. The Red Book confirms that, by the end of this financial year alone, the Treasury will have banked an additional £1.1 billion compared with the forecasts from March this year. Why is that extra money not being reinvested where it was generated? Compared with the March 2021 forecasts, the Chancellor now expects an additional £6 billion of oil and gas revenues over the lifetime of this Parliament. That means that, yet again, oil and gas revenues are paying for the Chancellor’s giveaways elsewhere. The reality is that with the extra oil and gas revenues, the extra petrol duties accruing from forecourts and the extra VAT from our soaring energy bills, the Budget was an opportunity to mitigate the cost-of-living crisis—an opportunity that has been ignored.

On the national insurance tax that has been imposed on us, Scottish Tories say, “Don’t worry—Westminster will give you back some money that you’ve already paid to Westminster.” Why are we supposed to be grateful for that?

Another fact about the energy sector in Scotland is that the Treasury has blocked the concept of ringfencing a pot of money for wave and tidal projects in the forth- coming contracts for difference auction. Such a concept would not even need a fiscal Budget line, and not ring- fencing that money could prevent world-leading technologies from scaling up and expanding all around the world. That is yet another matter on which the Scottish Tories and the Scottish Secretary of State are silent.

[Carol Monaghan]

I hope my hon. Friend is going to point out—maybe he is not, so I will—that the Scottish Tories support the SNP’s position on free tuition. It will be interesting to see how they vote on the Budget resolutions.

[Alan Brown]

I have trimmed my speech and have just trimmed that point out a wee bit, so I thank my hon. Friend for getting that on the record.

Let me return to energy. There is nothing in the Budget on pumped storage hydro—on which, again, the Scottish Tories have been silent—but hurray: tomorrow we get the Nuclear Energy (Financing) Bill. No doubt the Scottish Tories will troop through the Lobby to support that.

Let me turn to the levelling-up fund. Yet again, Scotland gets a cut of that, so let us get the Union Jacks out—“Hurray: we get a cut of the levelling-up fund!” The reality is that our cut is, in effect, based on the Barnett formula. When the Chancellor said last week that in the first round of funding Scotland is getting more than its Barnett share, all that means is that there is less money in the ringfenced pot for Scotland going forward, because it is all based on Barnett anyway. But as a Scottish Tory, I do not care, because I revel in the fact that the Scottish Government are being bypassed and there are small projects that we can put a Union Jack on.

As a Scottish Tory, I never acknowledge that the SNP has been in power for only 14 years. The Union has been in existence for more than 300 years, yet somehow every shortfall has happened only in the past 14 years. We must have quite a talent in reverse. The Budget still does not tell us what the shared prosperity fund will look like. It is supposed to replace the vital European funding streams that all the areas that have been overlooked by Westminster relied on to access vital funds for transport and infrastructure—and the Government talk about levelling up. We are currently losing out on funding and we do not know where the future shortfall is coming from, yet the Chancellor uses the phrase “levelling up”.

In conclusion, the Budget does nothing for Scotland. We have already seen, post Brexit, the damage that has been done to the fishing industry and to our farmers, despite the promises. More and more people can see that Westminster cannot be trusted, and it really is time that Scotland took full control of its own decision-making process.