Taxes

Alex Ballinger Excerpts

Wednesday 12th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sir Mel Stride]

I agree. Of course, higher taxes are bearing down on living standards, but so is inflation. We have the highest level of inflation in the G7 and are forecast to have the highest in the G7 next year, too. Within that sits food inflation, which is running way above the headline rate of inflation. Who does that impact the most? It impacts the very people that Labour professes to stand up for the strongest: the poorest in our society. It is a direct consequence of the policies pursued by this Chancellor.

[Alex Ballinger (Halesowen) (Lab)]

Does the shadow Chancellor recognise that the previous Government were the only Government in living memory to oversee a reduction in real living standards over the course of five years? Does he accept that the difficult situation with the cost of living is in large part due to his Government’s decisions over those five years?

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[Sir Mel Stride]

I am pleased that the hon. Gentleman has given me an opportunity to correct the record, because I know this has been spun by the Labour party. At a fringe meeting at the Conservative party conference, there was a long, extended debate about just how bad things are, with speculations about all the “what ifs” and “maybes” of different scenarios. If the hon. Gentleman reads the full transcript of those exchanges, he will see that the point I was very clearly making was that there is an alternative to putting up taxes, which is controlling spending. That is the point I was making.

What is happening to the wealth creators in our country? About 16,000 of them have fled—they are going by the day. These are the people who generate the wealth, jobs and growth that we are all striving to achieve. Look at the cumulative tax take that has just walked out of the door with the 16,000 who have gone—it would probably require a third of a million to half a million people on average earnings to fill that gap. It is not sustainable.

There is an alternative. The Conservatives set out this alternative at our party conference: a way forward through control of Government spending. Government spending could be controlled to the tune of at least £47 billion, which were the savings we identified. Of the £47 billion, £23 billion can be found from the welfare budget by getting people off benefits and into work. It is better for the economy, but equally, for those who have mild mental health conditions such as mild anxiety, mild depression and ADHD, it is a better outcome than parking them on benefits, which the Government are doing through time. By focusing on actual need rather than simply transfer payments and on medical diagnosis rather than self-assessments and by not paying benefits to non-UK citizens, we can make real savings. In some cases they are tough choices, absolutely. However, these are decisions that the Government have made.

[Alex Ballinger]

I thank the shadow Chancellor for giving way. He will of course remember his time as the Work and Pensions Minister, when he oversaw a £33 billion increase in the welfare budget. Of course he is talking about cuts now, but not about welfare cuts, because he had the opportunity to make those cuts and failed to do so. He is talking about cuts to teachers, nurses and our armed forces. Which of those three areas is he talking about cutting right now?

[Sir Mel Stride]

I am glad the hon. Gentleman has raised my tenure at the Department for Work and Pensions, when I was the Secretary of State. I was very clear that we needed to arrest the rising welfare bill, and—

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[Alex Ballinger]

Why didn’t you, then?

[Sir Mel Stride]

We did, actually. We did arrest it. We made changes to the work capability assessment, which the OBR scored at £5 billion-worth of savings. The OBR also scored the fact that there would be 450,000—almost half a million—fewer people going on to those benefits as a consequence. We had already started a consultation on personal independence payment, which I will come back to in a moment, but it was interrupted by the general election. The first thing the Labour Government did when they came into office was scrap all of that and then come forward with some ill-thought-through proposals that did not survive contact with their own Back Benchers.

There are other areas where we can make savings. The size of the civil service is one. The civil service has grown by 37% since 2016. We could cut it back by 25% and make about £8 billion—[Interruption.] The hon. Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger) should listen carefully to this, because he is about to sit on those benches on the 26th of this month and listen to his Chancellor come up with some pretty unpalatable things. These are good alternatives that should be taken seriously.

Raising taxes is simply a choice. The Labour Government are too weak to make the choice to control spending, so they fall back on taxes. They had to U-turn on the welfare reforms they brought through, and £5 billion was added to Labour’s black hole in an instant. We have seen the terms of reference for the Timms review of personal independence payment. They show quite clearly that there is no intention of saving any money from the PIP budget. That is grossly irresponsible. It is spiralling ever skyward.

From what we hear, it is highly likely that the two-child limit will be scrapped and abolished. Why? Probably because the Prime Minister, shackled to his Chancellor, is feeling that he is being squeezed halfway out the door of No. 10 and thinks he had better do something to settle the troops on the Back Benches. But that comes with a price tag of £3.5 billion. The only choice that this Chancellor is taking is to fail to get on top of spending and to put up taxes in order to fund ever more welfare.

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[James Murray]

The hon. Gentleman said “the Chancellor’s fiscal rules”, so I suspect that it was the Chancellor who introduced those fiscal rules. He gave it away in how he phrased the question.

The point is that when the Chancellor was setting out her economic strategy at the Budget last year, it was on the basis of the fiscal rules: day-to-day spending to be paid for through tax receipts rather than borrowing and debt to be falling as a proportion of GDP, to enable investment in the long-term future of the country. I see that the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Dr Spencer) is struggling to get his head around why that sense of fiscal reality and credibility is important, but we on the Government side believe that having those fiscal rules is crucial to that fiscal stability, to ensuring that we have that responsible attitude in government and to providing the stability for businesses to invest and grow the economy.

[Alex Ballinger]

My constituents, of course, remember Liz Truss’s devastating mini-Budget, when those rules were not followed. That had a massive impact on not just our public services but the mortgages and cost of living that my constituents are still feeling today. Does my right hon. Friend agree that going back to that irresponsible financial management would be a disaster for this country?

[James Murray]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right to point out the damage that recklessness in public office can cause families right across the country—not just for one day, but for months and years beyond that. The Conservative party is desperate for us to forget what happened when Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng were in Downing Street. But the British people will not forget, and they have been feeling the impacts for many years.

The Conservative party talks about public spending but its record on public spending is abysmal. It spent years in office with money lining the pockets of dodgy PPE providers as the bill for asylum seekers’ hotels soared. As my hon. Friend the Member for Halesowen (Alex Ballinger) just said, no debate on the Conservative record on tax and spend can be complete without mentioning the mini-Budget. Conservative Members are desperate for the British people to forget what happened three years ago and what the Conservative party foisted on the country. They are desperate to forget that their reckless unfunded tax cuts crashed our economy, damaged our international reputation and added hundreds of pounds to families’ mortgage costs. While British homeowners have been living with the consequences of the Conservatives every day, Conservative Members are all too conspicuous in their efforts to sweep their record under the rug.

True leadership is about not ducking the difficult decisions but confronting them head-on with a clear focus on priorities and values. That is what the Chancellor has promised to do in this Budget. As she set out last week, we will secure this country’s future with a Budget for growth led by this Government’s values of fairness and opportunity. We will do not what is politically expedient but what is necessary to protect families from high inflation and high interest rates; to protect and strengthen our public services, rejecting the austerity that Conservative Members seem keen to impose on our country once again; and to ensure that the economy that we leave to future generations is secure, with debt under control.

Our focus on cutting debt is crucial. We inherited a national debt of about 100% of GDP and since the spring the cost of borrowing has risen for Governments around the world. Today one in every £10 of taxpayers’ money in the UK is used to pay the interest on our national debt. That money should be going to our NHS, our schools, our police and our armed forces. Instead, it is going to our creditors. That is not what people pay taxes for.