Alec Shelbrooke
Main Page: Alec Shelbrooke (Conservative - Wetherby and Easingwold)Department Debates - View all Alec Shelbrooke's debates with the HM Treasury
amendment of the law
Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Hilary Benn
I am very proud of the record of the previous Labour Government: 2 million new homes, including 500,000 affordable homes, and a huge number of social homes that were brought up to decency standard. One thing that the previous Conservative Government bequeathed the previous Labour Government was a lot of council houses that were in poor condition because they had not invested any money in improving them. When the Secretary of State is next having a conversation with the Prime Minister, he might point out that the next time he walks down that famous staircase in No. 10 past the photographs of his predecessors, he will have to get all the way to Stanley Baldwin to find a Prime Minister with a worse record of building houses than the current occupant of that office.
In his 2011 Budget speech, the Chancellor told us that he would deliver an economy
“carried aloft by the march of the makers.”—[Official Report, 23 March 2011; Vol. 525, c. 966.]
Although, as the Secretary of State says, housing starts are now finally up, what has happened to construction output overall? It has fallen by 4.2%. I do not know how many marches the Chancellor has been on, but the general idea of a march is that one goes forwards rather than backwards.
Although the Government’s record of building houses has been poor, they have intervened in the mortgage market through Help to Buy, and last Wednesday the Chancellor made an announcement about extending the equity loan scheme to 2020. As I have said before from this Dispatch Box, we support help for people, especially first-time buyers, to realise their dream of home ownership, but if the Government simply increase demand and do not do enough to increase supply, all that will happen is that house prices will rise further out of reach of the very people we are seeking to help. That is why the Treasury Committee and the International Monetary Fund express concerns about Help to Buy. I presume that the Chancellor has now finally acknowledged that, as he told the House last week that he has asked the Bank of England
“to be particularly vigilant against the emergence of potential risks in the housing market.”—[Official Report, 19 March 2014; Vol. 577, c. 783-84.]
That is progress, but could the Minister tell us when he replies exactly what that means in practice and how we and the public will be kept informed of how that vigilance is operating?
Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)
First, I offer my condolences to the right hon. Gentleman, as a fellow Leeds MP, for the loss his family has suffered. As a fellow Leeds MP, he will know some of the pressures of development in Leeds, with some 70,000 units to be built in the city, despite talk in the Leeds core strategy. Does he agree that we must be careful about where these large-scale developments are built? If we are massively to change the shape of the village of Scholes in my constituency, say, that would have the unfortunate effect of lowering house prices and putting people into—
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)
Order. I think that the right hon. Gentleman, as he knows the area so well, has the message.
Hilary Benn
I am very strongly in favour of affordable housing—I was not aware that we had any county councils in west London, but I think that the hon. Lady was referring to something else. We need more private housing, more housing for rent and more social housing at a price that people can afford.
We also need new towns and garden cities, so what about what I would refer to as the great mystery of the highly reclusive new towns and garden cities prospectus? Just to remind the House, two years ago, the Prime Minister announced that he would be publishing a consultation by the end of the year on garden cities—does everyone remember that?—but 2012 came to an end and it did not appear, and 2013 happened and it still did not materialise. We then read reports in the newspapers that the Prime Minister was suppressing a document and had gone cold on the whole idea. Then, in January, the Housing Minister said that he was not aware of a report that was supposed to have been published, but the Deputy Prime Minister said that there was a prospectus and that the Government should be honest about their intentions. Then the Secretary of State contradicted his Housing Minister and said that he had been told by his Department that there was a report, but not a report from the Department for Communities and Local Government—I do hope the House is keeping up.
Then, last week, the Chancellor announced that there would be a new garden city at Ebbsfleet with 15,000 homes. The only trouble is that that is 5,000 fewer homes than the 20,000-home development announced for Ebbsfleet in December 2012. Only this Chancellor could proclaim a smaller development as a triumph—backwards not forwards. We look forward to the publication of that prospectus, hopefully before Easter, and if the Secretary of State has not already seen a copy, I trust he will ask for it. After such a lengthy gestation, I hope that it does not disappoint him or the rest of us.
That episode shows that there has clearly been fighting within the Government—within the Cabinet—about what should be in it. We now know, thanks to the Yorkshire Post and the Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, the hon. Member for Bristol West (Stephen Williams), that the same thing is happening inside the Department for Communities and Local Government.
I feel very sorry for the Under-Secretary, whom I notice is not in his place today, because he does not always look entirely happy and that may be why he decided to unburden himself at the Lib Dem conference recently. He said that being compared to the Secretary of State—I think it was a joke—was
“the most grievous possible insult”
that anyone could deliver. I think that is unfair and unkind to his boss. He was complimentary about the Planning Minister but said that he was
“hated by many Tory MPs”.
That is possibly true, but I think it is also unfair, and since then, the hon. Gentleman seems to have been given all the pretty unpleasant jobs in the Department, defending the indefensible. I hope the fact that he is not here today does not mean that he is being held hostage in the Department by the Secretary of State and I hope that he retains his independent streak.
The most damning comments from the Under-Secretary were about a flagship policy of his own Department:
“The new homes bonus… I’m not a fan of. I don’t think it’s an incentive, necessarily, for local authorities to give planning permission. I don’t think it’s actually driving decision-making on the ground.”
He is in good company, because the National Audit Office agrees. As we are already aware, the Housing Minister does not seem to know what it is meant for either, because he has told the House:
“I am afraid the new homes bonus is not about encouraging people to build homes.”—[Official Report, 25 November 2013; Vol. 571, c. 11.]
We have now had it from two Ministers—it is not effective.
The new homes bonus is also profoundly unfair. It is given to councils according to the number of homes that happen to be built in their area and it is top-sliced from formula grant, which is distributed according to need. Therefore—surprise, surprise—the areas that are getting most of the money are those where the homes will probably be built anyway, which tend to be better off, while the areas that are losing funding are those where there is less demand for housing, which tend to be worse off. It is yet another example of this Government, in tough times, taking most from those who have least, and in so doing they fail that basic test of fairness.
The Government just do not get it. At a time when real wages are falling, as was confirmed by the Office for Budget Responsibility document published last week, they think that the most important thing to do is give millionaires a tax cut. They think that councils in the most deprived areas with the greatest need should face the biggest reductions, while some of the wealthiest councils get an increase in the money they have to spend.
There are 10 Members of Parliament lucky enough to have councils in their constituencies that will be better off in terms of spending power per household—the Secretary of State’s preferred measure—by 2015-16 than they were in 2010-11. Four of them are in the Cabinet. Two of them are Government Whips. Under this Secretary of State, the 25 most deprived local authorities in England will lose 10 times as much spending power per household as the 25 least deprived.
Not only are we seeing the biggest reductions in spending power in the areas with the highest need while there are increases in spending power in the wealthiest areas, but before long, the funding difference between those areas, having eroded, will in some cases be reversed. Within four years, under this Government, local spending power per household will be higher in Wokingham—I am sorry that the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr Redwood) is no longer in his place—than it will be in Leeds, Sheffield or Newcastle, even though those cities face far greater pressures.
Most people would say that that is extraordinary. Most people would regard it as unfair and impossible to justify. So why does the Secretary of State think that areas in greater need should actually receive less? We know what he thinks already, because in tough times for councils some services are becoming unviable, with entitlement to social care disappearing in some cases, and libraries, the arts, Sure Start centres and women’s refuges going. What does he say to councils? He says, “What’s your problem? These cuts are really quite modest. What are you complaining about?”
It is not just communities that are being hit; it is the people in the greatest need in those communities. What has the Secretary of State done? He has forced up council tax bills for people in work on the lowest incomes: carers, the disabled, injured veterans and war widows. Summonses have been issued and bailiffs are knocking on doors, because people are poor. That is why they are being affected.
The Government are forcing people to pay the hated and immoral bedroom tax, undermining community, neighbourliness and a sense of place. Once again, that hits people on the lowest incomes, most of whom are disabled. Let us consider for a moment a family receiving housing benefit, a mother and father with two children living in a three-bedroom council house. If one of the children leaves home to get a job, the Government are telling that family, “Move.” Two years later, the second child leaves home and gets a job elsewhere. What do the Government say to that family? They say, “Just move again”, leaving mum and dad in a one-bedroom property. Then, three years later, the father’s mother becomes ill and needs to come and live with them so that they can care for her. What do the Government say? “Oh, just move again.” I cannot think of a policy more calculated to undermine family life, and you know what? That family will not even have a spare bedroom so that their grandchildren can come and stay. That is why people are so angry about the bedroom tax and why, if we win in 2015, we will abolish it.
Hilary Benn
The hon. Gentleman has had a go. I am going to bring my remarks to an end, because many people want to speak.
Only last week, when the Chancellor had the nerve to get up in the House and say, “Oh, well, we are all in this together”, and the OBR confirmed that real wages were falling, what did we discover? That some Cabinet Ministers had been giving hefty pay rises—to whom? Their special advisers. The architect of and chief apologist for the bedroom tax, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, gave his special adviser a 36% pay increase in one year alone. If that is not proof that this Government stand up for the wrong people, I do not know what is.
This is a Budget that provides too little, too late to deal with either the chronic shortage of houses or the cost of living crisis, and the Chancellor and the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government have shown once again that they do not really understand, and are not prepared to take the action that we need to make life better for the British people.
Mr Campbell
According to the Conservatives, we should have wrapped the banks in red tape and nailed them to the floor. Would they have done that? Of course not. They would have done exactly what we did.
I want to get to the meat of the problem, so I will start with pensions. I am not a believer in a nanny state and never have been. If Members look at my record, they will see that I have voted against many such proposals. I looked at the pensions proposal carefully. I know a lot of pensioners who are not getting what they should be getting out of their pensions after they have bought an annuity.
The proposal reminds me of when I was a coal miner. When all the coal mines were closing, the Government decided that the miners could pull their pension out of the National Union of Mineworkers pension fund and put it into something else if they got a better deal. Of course, all the Scrooges came around, knocking at the doors of the miners. They said, “Will you organise a meeting?” Would I hell! They were there to grab the miners’ money. I am pleased that the Secretary of State for Transport is here, because he knows what I am talking about.
A lot of the men were bought. They pulled their money out of the miners’ pension scheme and put it into all sorts of finance companies that offered them a better deal. That did not last two years. Before long, they were all trying to get back into the scheme. The other schemes were a disaster. There was mis-selling on a big scale. The miners’ pension scheme had to be opened again so that the men could put their pensions back into it. They were given two years to do it. If they did not do it in that time, they were left with the company that they had gone with.
We have to be careful that that sort of mis-selling does not happen. I understand the problem. It is good that people can have control of their own money. I have no problem with that, but we might be stirring up a hornets’ nest. I do not trust the institutions one little bit.
On wages, we all know—it is a fact that is on record—that people who are working have lost out by £1,600 a year. People in two or three industries—especially those who work in local government, which we are talking about tonight—have not had a rise for three or four years. According to the latest figures that I have, £39 billion has been taken out of the economy since the austerity programme started because people have not got wage rises. It is no wonder that the economy is sluggish. If money is taken out of the economy, it will be sluggish. All that some workers have to look forward to is zero-hours contracts and food banks.
People do not realise what the welfare cap means or what it includes. Child benefit is capped. Incapacity benefit is capped. Winter fuel allowance is capped. Income support is capped. People do not realise what the cap means. There is a big figure, but people do not realise what is under it and what it means for them.
Mr Campbell
No, I do not have time.
I got hold of a letter from the Department for Work and Pensions. It says that before the austerity measures were brought in, an average of 12,530 people on jobseeker’s allowance were sanctioned each month in north-east England. Under the new arrangements brought in by this Government, that has gone up to an average of 29,000 people a month. People are being sanctioned and do not have any money. That is why the food banks are increasing. People have no money and do not know where they will get their next meal, so they have to be sent to the food bank.
Some people are sanctioned fairly and some are rightly sanctioned. Like other Members, I have had many people come to my office who have never looked for a job. I tell them that they have to go out and look for a job—that even if it is a job as a brain surgeon, they should apply for it. A lot of people are not doing that, but a lot of people are and they are being sanctioned unfairly.
The borrowing requirements are a bit of a joke. In this year alone, the Government will borrow £50 billion. Perhaps that is where all the money is going. That will leave us £111 billion in debt. That is the situation that this country is in. If that is the economy getting better and if that is the country reducing the deficit, I will eat my hat. Quite honestly, I think that we are heading for the rocks or for a car crash—one or the other.
Paul Uppal (Wolverhampton South West) (Con)
It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Blyth Valley (Mr Campbell). I was not going to make some of these points, but I cannot resist.
In 1997, some 17 years ago, many of us were not yet Members of Parliament. I remember the Labour party coming into office to the theme tune “Things Can Only Get Better”. The electorate will judge that claim in times to come. Labour likes to talk about the Conservatives’ 26 tax rises, but the inconvenient truth is that under all Labour Governments the burden of taxation increases dramatically. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west; Labour will always raise taxes and spend our money. Those are the truisms of life, and they always will be.
An increase from 10% to 11% in employees’ national insurance may not sound like much, but it amounts to an increase of 10%; in the case of the employer, the rise was a shocking 28%. No wonder Conservatives recognise national insurance contributions as a tax on jobs. Labour can talk all it wants about tax rises, but the people of Britain have long memories and will remember 13 years of a Labour Government during which the Treasury regularly raided people’s pay packets, and created a system in which businesses faced increased pressures and costs when creating jobs.
Alec Shelbrooke
Can my hon. Friend explain why some people think the banks caused all the borrowing, when Labour borrowed £80 billion in 2006?
Paul Uppal
My hon. Friend makes a reasonable point. Labour took its eye off the ball when it came to borrowing, and no one can deny that.
Thankfully, today things are different. Taxes on business were too high under Labour and corporation tax was 28% when this Government came to power. As the new tax year approaches, businesses will feel the impact of several important tax cuts. Corporation tax will fall to 21%, help on business rates will come in, and the landmark employment allowance will take up to £2,000 off employers’ national insurance bills.
Politics is always about being local, and in my constituency the Government’s changes are translating into new jobs and opportunities for my city. I have spoken regularly in the House about the positive impact that the arrival of Jaguar Land Rover will have on the city, but I have not so far spoken about the impact of the new Sainsbury’s store on Raglan street, which will create nearly 200 jobs. The sprawling Raglan street site stood empty for 10 years; it was a blight on the city and a sad symbol of our lack of progress. One of my first priorities was for that to change and, thankfully, ground was finally broken at the site last October.
This morning, it was a pleasure to welcome my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer to Marston’s, a valued employer and brewery in my constituency. The company, which employs around 1,000 people at its brewery and headquarters, invests in opening dozens of new pub-restaurants every year, creating hundreds of jobs nationwide. I met the chief executives of three breweries, all of whom concurred with the view that the Budget was good news for jobs and growth.
The third and final piece of good news for the city came two weeks ago, when I visited the Woodthorne development by David Wilson Homes on Wergs road in Wolverhampton. Local jobs have been created to provide new homes in the city. The Woodthorne development will provide 58 new homes over the coming months, underpinning nearly 120 jobs for local people. It is great news that new homes are being built in the city and that a local work force is being used to build them. Support for small and medium-sized developers to access development finance through the builders finance fund will provide more than £500 million for two years from 2015-16 to deliver up to 15,000 homes.
The Help to Buy loan scheme has already helped 25,000 people to buy their own homes when they could not previously afford the deposit, and it has helped to build more houses. Owning one’s own home should always be one of life’s biggest aspirations, and the Government will help even more people to achieve that dream.
People who have worked hard and saved hard all their lives will now be trusted with their own finances. The Government will completely change the tax treatment of defined contribution pensions to bring it into line with the modern world. From March 2017, the Government will cut the income requirement for flexible draw-down from £20,000 to £12,000, raise the capped draw-down limit from 120% to 150%, and almost double the total pension savings people can take as a lump sum to £30,000. I am really heartened by that initiative because it constitutes a clear blue line and political divide: we trust people with their own money.
I have been poor in my life—to be honest, I have been dirt poor. What got me and my family out of poverty was taking responsibility for myself, making my own choices and taking my own risks—not a Government body or quango. The Government will empower people by trusting them with their own money, and the changes on annuities encapsulate that sentiment.
The Budget also shows that we are on the side of manufacturers, creating a Britain that makes things again. We are cutting the cost of manufacturing by cutting the cost of energy bills for manufacturers. We are doubling the annual investment allowance to £500,000 and delivering the most competitive export finance in Europe by doubling the Government lending available to exporters to £3 billion, and cutting the typical interest rate on it by more than a third.
Boosting savings, putting the public finances on a stable footing and making it easier for companies to invest were the key themes of this year’s Budget, and I support wholeheartedly the Government’s efforts to continue to rebuild our once broken economy. It is interesting to reflect on those key themes and what we remember from 1997 onwards—golden economic rules, prudence and, more recently, “cutting too far, too fast”. We do not hear those words any more. At least this Budget will build an economic inheritance that we can pass on to our children.
Mr Newmark
That is a fine example of exactly why raising the allowance from £25,000 to £250,000 was an important decision that created jobs. As my hon. Friend has indicated, doubling it again will create even more jobs.
This is a Budget for hard-working people, with petrol duty frozen; a penny off a pint of beer, again; and, most importantly, the personal allowance raised to £10,500, cutting taxation for over 25 million people and lifting 3.2 million people out of tax altogether.
Mr Newmark
I can give way only twice; I am sorry about that.
A typical taxpayer in my constituency of Braintree will pay £805 less in tax than they would have done before.
This Budget continues the drive to reform local public services and get value for money for local people. Braintree district council, under the leadership of Councillor Graham Butland, has reduced council taxes by 1% this year and 1% again next year, yet the council continues to invest in our town centres with initiatives such as the new jewellery village, supporting 12 new traders in Braintree town, and the pop-up shops generating four new retailers such as Chic Décor, started by Emma Jane Jarvis.
Essex county council, under the leadership of Councillor David Finch, is also to be congratulated. It has frozen its council tax for four years in a row, yet at the same time invested £3 million in flood prevention, £1 million in youth facilities, and £1.4 million to support vulnerable older people. Of course, the extra £2.7 million of funding in this Budget to address the blight of potholes on our roads throughout Essex, but especially in our rural areas, is also more than welcome.
This is indeed a Budget for hard-working people: for the makers, the doers, and the savers. Our long-term economic plan is slowly but surely beginning to pay dividends. I am delighted to support the 2014 Budget.
Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)
I rise in support of a Budget that really gets down to doing the job.
Let me start with a constant bugbear of my constituents: the state of the roads. The additional funding to repair the potholes and road damage that came about over the winter is hugely welcome to my constituents. The funding for my city of Leeds is £949,426—almost £1 million of extra money. Altogether, the Government will have spent £4.5 billion on road repairs in this Parliament, which is £800 million more than the last Labour Government spent in their final term in office.
We need to keep a close eye on where the Labour party on Leeds city council spends that money. It has almost revelled in making cuts to front-line services in our city, purely for politically motivated reasons. That is the only explanation for why, when cutting front-line services, it has spent £1.8 million on a website, £600,000 on furniture and hundreds of thousands of pounds on union time and facilities. We must ensure that the £1 million that goes into Leeds is spent as extra money on the roads, and is not the only money that is spent on the roads. Unfortunately, we have a Labour council in Leeds which governs in its own political interests, not in the interests of those who rely on its services. Even outside the financial issues, the council is too slow to get anything sorted out, such as housing and land supply.
It is massively welcome to cities such as Leeds and constituencies such as mine that a £500 million pot is now available for SME developers. With the inclusion of windfall—and my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey (Stuart Andrew) and I lobbied very hard for Leeds to be included in the land supply—it means that we should be able to relieve the pressure that villages in my constituency feel to take some of the 12,500 houses that Leeds city council has designated for the area. The time taken to identify major areas of sustainable development, such as Headley Fields in the north of my constituency and Makins Farm in Garforth, is ridiculously slow, but the proactive stance that we are taking in the city is much better than the Labour policy of building 200,000 new homes and seizing the land to build them on—a frankly Stalinist policy. Labour leaflets talk proudly of that policy, but fail to tell local communities that they would effectively lose any say in the location of that development.
I am sure that my hon. Friend the Minister will be interested to hear a few other gems from Labour’s latest newsletter on economic policy. Top of the list is a pension triple lock, so that any increase would never be lower than 2.5% and would also be in line with the higher of earnings or inflation. One can only guess how Labour thought that policy up—it sounds like a winner. I would suggest that we adopt it if we had not already done so three years ago. It certainly beats the 75p rise of a few years ago. Labour also voted against our triple lock when we introduced it.
Labour also says that it will cut taxes for 24 million people by introducing a 10p rate, but in office it doubled tax on the lowest earners. We did not double that tax: we abolished it. Effectively, that is a watering down of the policy of abolishing tax for the lowest paid. Labour says that it will back small businesses by—wait for this—cutting the rates in 2015 and then freezing them. We gave £1,000 back to businesses with under £50,000 of rateable value, which had a huge impact on the SMEs and small shop owners in my villages of Wetherby, Garforth and Rothwell—a real investment after years of non-investment.
Labour also says it will strengthen the minimum wage: we are doing that. What we are not doing is chasing easy headlines on the living wage, which has already risen by 40p since the argument started a few months ago. We cannot chase wages with an inflation-led policy: we have to make sure that we cut taxes on businesses so that the money goes into the pockets of hard-working people such as my constituents. That approach is sustainable in the long run and that is what we are doing. I want to see the minimum wage reach at least £7, when we are able to afford it by cutting taxes and making sure that what businesses are not giving to the Government goes directly into the pockets of the people who are doing the work.
Compare our approach to Labour’s compulsory jobs guarantee scheme, which no firms have signed up to. It would subsidise public sector jobs and create non-jobs. There is nothing more demoralising than being sent to a workplace with nothing to do. Do not patronise my constituents: do what the Government are doing and ensure that we have strong economic growth, leading to real jobs for people. Apprenticeships in my constituency are up 63% since the election, and that is making a real difference. I have had enough Labour shadow Ministers coming to my constituency recently to hear that from people on the doorstep. Clearly they have their ears closed to them, as they seem to listen only to the Labour candidate with all her ideas from Tooting, where she lives. Perhaps those ideas work well around the dinner tables in London, but in my constituency they would not work at all. My hon. Friend the Minister should take heart from the fact that the Opposition’s economic policies have either already been put in place by the Government or have no traction outside the north London kitchen tables in the multi-million pound houses of Labour Front Benchers.
We froze council tax: that is why hard-working people have seen their taxes cut. But this year Labour has raised it by 1.99%—a disgraceful attempt to hoodwink the electorate.
Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)
I am much obliged to you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for calling me at this late hour to speak about what I consider to be an extremely effective Budget. I think that it is a Budget about business, about aspiration, and about savings. I also think that it recognises what everyone else has recognised in the last six months: that the country is back on its feet after a very poor period of stagnating growth, and that we have stuck to the plan and put Britain back on track.
It is particularly paradoxical to hear Opposition Members say that the recovery is unbalanced. A year ago, they complained that there was no recovery. A year ago, they were talking about triple dip. A year ago, they were talking about trying to go back to plan B and ditching the original plan. Today, when we have the strongest growth in the OECD and the strongest growth among our European partners, they complain about the nature of the growth. It is true that the growth could be more balanced, but I certainly prefer some growth to no growth whatsoever.
I want to talk about the general fiscal position of this country. We have heard a lot of arguments today, especially from the right hon. Member for Neath (Mr Hain), suggesting that Labour had nothing to do with the debt crisis and the deficit this Government inherited in 2010. Nothing could be more absurd. If we look at the fiscal position in 2001, we will see that the Budget was balanced. In fact I think the first Labour Administration were pretty good in terms of the fiscal position—I have said that publicly before, although I was not endorsed by the Whips for doing so. For those four years the Budget was either in balance or in surplus and it was a very good fiscal record.
Alec Shelbrooke
During the first four years of that Labour Government, which were fiscally very good, they were following the plans adopted by the previous Chancellor, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Rushcliffe (Mr Clarke).
Kwasi Kwarteng
Absolutely, but I think we should, in this very partisan place, give credit where credit is due. That Labour Government ran a very good, tight ship for four years, but then of course the demons of their worst nature took over and they reverted to type, and from 2002 right through to the crisis we ran deficit after deficit after deficit. That was the inexcusable part of that Government. It was bad Gordon as opposed to good Gordon—prudent Gordon—that took over after 2001, and the previous Prime Minister himself, the then Member for Sedgefield, has suggested that they spent too much money. He has admitted that while he was Prime Minister the Government spent too much money, and that is clearly the case. In the Budgets from 2002 right up to 2007, before the banking crisis was even an issue and before Lehman Brothers went broke, the Government were continually running deficits.