Autumn Forecast

Alan Johnson Excerpts

Monday 29th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

Our economy was unstable, our public finances were out of control and our country was on the international watch list to avoid. We took decisive action. Now, the independent Office for Budget Responsibility has confirmed that the British recovery is on track, our public finances are under control, 1 million jobs are set to be created and our economy is rebalancing. Today we are taking further measures to secure growth and create prosperity. We are doing so based on the foundation of stability that we have now secured. Britain is on the mend, and I commend this statement to the House.

[Alan Johnson (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)]

Let us move from bombast to reality. Here is what the OBR says:

“As we discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, past experience and common sense suggest that our central forecasts for both the economy and the public finances are almost certain to be wrong and that there are upside and downside risks to both.”

The only question is on which side of wrong they actually fall.

This Government have committed our country to a rate of fiscal consolidation that has been attempted only twice in living memory, and on both occasions by countries that benefited from strong growth in a benign global environment. In the current economic crisis, no country other than Ireland has attempted to cut so deeply, so quickly. The Chancellor is always telling us that we have the highest fiscal deficit in the G20. That is not true: the US has a proportionally higher fiscal deficit than ours, and the Americans plan to reduce it by less than half over the next five years. Japan, which has roughly the same level of deficit, has learnt from its experience over the past 10 years and plans to cut by less than a quarter. The Chancellor has chosen to take an unprecedented gamble with people’s livelihoods and the country’s future, and he has done so on the basis of a fundamental deceit: that when he assumed office, the public finances were worse than expected. The OBR exposed that deceit last year, and it has confirmed it today, so will the Chancellor now tell all those Back Benchers behind him—all those Tories who claim to their constituents that things are worse than they expected, and of course those who tell them that they have never had it so good—that they will have to find a new excuse? Nothing in his statement today can hide the fact that it was the balanced approach of my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling)—[Hon. Members: “ Where is he?”] Snowed in, in Scotland, probably. It was the balanced approach of my right hon. Friend that saw growth return at the beginning of the year, saw the recovery gain momentum and led to nearly 1 million fewer people claiming out-of-work benefits than predicted. That was the previous Chancellor, not this one.

As expected, the OBR has produced a higher growth forecast for this year than at the time of the emergency Budget, but this is the result of an approach that this Government have rejected. The reckless gamble that coalition Members support is still to come; the Chancellor is in the casino, but he has not yet spun the wheel. The OBR’s judgment of the future matters more than its revised forecast for a year that is almost over.

Does the Chancellor accept that the OBR does not expect the fast momentum built up this year to be maintained? Indeed, it is explicit in saying that it expects a slow recovery. Next year, as spending cuts begin to take effect and the VAT hike dampens demand, the OBR is revising its growth forecast down from 2.6% before the emergency budget to 2.3% immediately afterwards and to 2.1% now—it is going south. Looking beyond next year, the forecast for growth over the first four years of the recovery is reduced to an average of 2.4%. This compares with a 3.1% average growth in the far from pain-free recoveries from the two Tory recessions in the 1980s and 1990s. That growth was largely driven by growth in the financial sector and in public services, neither of which will be in a position to help this time.

Lower growth means fewer jobs, and in this weak recovery the OBR, having changed its mind, is now forecasting something that the Chancellor could not bring himself to say—namely, that unemployment will rise next year. It no wonder that the Conservative-led Local Government Association pointed out last week that front-loading cuts in local authorities will lead to 140,000 job losses next year, which is much higher than originally expected. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development estimates that the increase in VAT on 4 January will cost 250,000 jobs, more than three times as many as our proposed increase in national insurance, which the Conservatives called a tax on jobs.

The Chancellor tells us that public sector jobs will be protected by his decision to cut welfare benefits, but this works both ways: can he tell the House what the additional hit to private sector jobs will be from those welfare changes? For families up and down this country, a jobless recovery will be no recovery at all. This Government have no interest in protecting jobs, no alternative measures if the gamble fails and, worst of all, no plan for jobs. Indeed, since just last week their growth plan has actually shrunk, from a White Paper that was supposed to contain proposals, to today’s promise to talk: there will now be a debate, a discussion.

The Government’s plans rely on a huge increase in exports and business investment. Let us hope they materialise. But it is a gamble to assume that cuts on the scale envisaged, with cyclically adjusted public borrowing reduced by 8% of gross domestic product in just five years, will automatically be compensated for by exports. Exports need markets, and there is nothing to suggest that the global economic climate will assist us in achieving the kind of boost to growth that we have not seen for 60 years.

The Chancellor talked about his plans for corporation tax. Everyone wants a tax system that supports business, but he has abolished investment allowances for manufacturing to pay for a cut in corporation tax that will give a further £1 billion to the banks. Can he tell us what sense there is in helping companies that make large profits for little investment, at the expense of businesses that will invest heavily in the UK? We were very pleased to hear his announcement on GlaxoSmithKline and the patent box. We were pleased because that was our proposal. It was me, as Secretary of State for Health, with the former Business Minister, Lord Dyson, who argued for that in Cabinet. That is why it was in last year’s pre-Budget report. It is an excellent proposal. It was a Labour proposal.

Here is an idea for the Star Chamber that the Government are going to form. Why not help UK advanced manufacturing in the civil nuclear supply chain by giving an £80 million loan to Sheffield Forgemasters? That is an idea that they can chew over for the next four months.

The Chancellor talked about developments relating to Ireland. As I said last week, we support the financial assistance offered to Ireland, but the lessons of Ireland cannot be ignored. As a Financial Times leader said last week,

“a slower pace of consolidation might have been its best bet at encouraging growth.”

That is a lesson for us as well.

The Chancellor’s analytical ability in respect of Ireland was demonstrated in his 2006 article, which has been widely quoted, but in 2008, just two years ago, confident that Ireland would not be affected by the financial crisis that was just emerging, he said that Ireland now had

“a ‘future fund’ of assets built to provide security against future shocks and liabilities. Their public finances are well placed. Their competitiveness has risen. Their institutions are stronger.”

Ireland had

“used the fat years to prepare for the lean years.”

The Chancellor was wrong about Ireland, and he is wrong about the United Kingdom. The autumn statement does nothing to alleviate the summer madness that led him to gamble so recklessly with our future.

[Mr Osborne]

I think the shadow Chancellor made the mistake of writing his response before he had seen the OBR’s forecast. He predicated all of it on there somehow being lower growth, when in fact growth is higher in every quarter and every year than was predicted in the June forecast. I assume that he also wrote his response before the European Commission produced its forecast today. I am sure that he has now seen it. He read out a list of countries, but the European Commission predicts that over the next two years we will grow more quickly than Germany, France, the United States of America, Japan, the eurozone and the EU average. If one is going to read out a list of countries, one might as well start with the most accurate and recent forecast for their economies.

As I have said, the shadow Chancellor’s response was not much of an analysis of what the OBR has said today. He skated over the fact that because of the welfare changes that we have introduced, we have been able to reduce the public sector headcount reduction that is required by any deficit reduction plan—including, presumably, the plan that he will one day propose. He should at least acknowledge that the welfare changes achieve that. He and the leader of his party have some important choices to make in the next few months as we vote on some of these measures. They must decide whether they will support welfare reform or would rather see a higher number of public sector job losses, but that will be a decision for them.

The shadow Chancellor said that he did not believe in the rebalancing of the economy, and that the assumptions for exports and investment that I had made were fanciful. They are, of course, the estimates made by this independent body, the appointment of whose members, as I have said, was ratified by the Treasury Committee. The shadow Chancellor accused me of having no alternative measures to present. I thought that that was a bit of a cheek, because as far as I can tell the Labour party has a blank sheet of paper as its new economic policy. He talked of the importance of protecting intellectual property and supporting the growth of patents, and then praised, I believe, James Dyson. The last time I checked, it was we, rather than the shadow Chancellor, who had consulted him, but so be it.

[Alan Johnson]

Lord Drayson.

[Mr Osborne]

Ah. Well, I am sure that Lord Drayson also had some interesting things to say. [Interruption.] I welcome, by the way—[Interruption.]