Budget Resolutions

Alex Cunningham Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Mel Stride]

I can reassure all mortgage holders up and down the country that this Government are absolutely determined to see inflation return to its target. The OBR’s economic and fiscal outlook, published yesterday, makes it clear that we will meet the 2% target one year earlier than it forecast in the autumn. The significance of that for interest rates is obvious: interest rates will come down faster if inflation recedes quicker, and that is exactly what has happened.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

On that point, will the Minister give way?

[Mel Stride]

I have been very generous with my time, but how can I say no? I must then make some progress.

[Alex Cunningham]

The Minister is a decent man. The Government make much of getting value for money, but they have little to say about the handing over of Teesside’s greatest land asset to two private developers, who have since banked tens of millions of pounds in profits, leaving crumbs for the public. That is after the investment of £500 million of taxpayers’ money and no private investment. Is the Minister content with that, or does he believe, as his own Government’s inquiry into the Tees Mayor’s business dealings recommended, that the deal should be renegotiated?

[Mel Stride]

I will not get into the weeds of the issue that the hon. Gentleman is attempting to draw me into, other than to say that he made at least one comment that I agree with: I am indeed a decent man. I thank him very much for that.

Inflation is falling faster than expected. People’s wages are rising in real terms, and have done for the last seven months. Under this Government, our labour market has been strong and resilient, delivering opportunities despite the headwinds. We have put incentives at the heart of our welfare. We have grown faster than Germany, France or Italy. According to the OBR, we will continue to do so over the next five years. We are attracting the business investment that is key to growth, delivering high- quality jobs across the country—from Nissan to Google to AstraZeneca, which announced £650 million of investment only yesterday.

No matter how much the Labour party seeks to talk down Britain, the investment flowing into our economy is a huge vote of confidence in our country. It shows that our plan is working. By contrast, as has been laid all too bare this afternoon, the Labour party has no plan or credible record. I have already gone through the tale of woe about the level of unemployment that Labour has left us in the past. Those poor young people had a 45% increase in youth employment on the watch of the shadow Chancellor’s party, and over 1 million people were left on out-of-work benefits for almost a decade.

On the Government Benches, we believe that work, not welfare is key to improving living standards. That is why we are incentivising and rewarding work in this Budget. Making work pay and ensuring families are better off means tackling the global inflation that I have referred to, on which we are making significant progress. As inflation decreases, we recognise that there are still some people who need extra help. I was pleased to see the extension of the household support fund for a further six months from April, which was also pushed for by the Chair of the Work and Pensions Committee, the right hon. Member for East Ham (Sir Stephen Timms).

--- Later in debate ---

[Rachel Maclean]

I do not accept that, and I do not wish to rerun all the previous debates. The Government have listened to a lot of the issues involved in the roll-out of an incredibly complicated system, and the evidence speaks for itself. Universal credit has helped more people get into work, and work is always the best route out of poverty.

Before I move on, I will make a few comments about mental health conditions. A category of people in our country are the economically inactive, which is sad to me and many of us, because those people are fundamentally not free—they are dependent on the state. My concern is that the number of working-age adults who are out of the labour market because of long-term sickness has been rising since 2019, from about 2.2 million people then to about 2.5 million in the summer of 2022. I understand that that started before the covid pandemic.

The biggest relative jump in economic inactivity due to long-term sickness is among the under-35s, whose main complaints are depression, bad nerves or anxiety. I have two psychology degrees, and I fully understand mental illness and mental ill health. I also believe in using words precisely. I am therefore alarmed to see the conflation of the terms depression and anxiety together with “bad nerves”. Bad nerves? Both anxiety and depression are clinically recognised conditions; bad nerves is not.

Government statistics, obtained following several questions that I posed to the Department, do not break down the number of people self-reporting under each condition, and there is no data or information on how that concept of bad nerves is defined, assessed, treated, understood or prevented as a separate condition from depression and anxiety. That is because there cannot be. Having “bad nerves” is a totally meaningless phrase. No one knows what it is, so how can people decide if they are unfit to work if they have it? I have bad nerves about standing to speak in this Chamber, and my constituents have bad nerves when they are navigating the day-to-day challenges of juggling work and family. The phrase sounds like something out of a good housewife manual in the 1950s.

I simply do not believe, frankly, that bad nerves is a reason to be on sickness benefits, and yet figures from the labour force survey indicate that 1.3 million people are economically inactive due to some combination of bad nerves, anxiety and depression. We do not know how many are off because of each condition or how many are off because of bad nerves. I think it would be a good idea for the Department and the Ministers I can see on the Front Bench to understand on a more granular level what conditions are preventing our constituents getting back into work, so that we can target more efficiently the taxes of our constituents who are working hard for long hours and paying into the system, so ultimately reducing the bill.

[Alex Cunningham]

Did the hon. Lady detect anywhere in the Chancellor’s statement or the Red Book where he actually says, “We will put more resources into dealing with mental health services”?

[Rachel Maclean]

Over my time as a Member of Parliament, I have detected many statements by many Ministers on the Treasury Bench about investing in mental health services and back to work services, nationally and in my constituency. Redditch has a brand-new local mental health hub, delivered by the Conservative Government, and the Conservative borough council led by the excellent Mr Matt Dormer.

It is worth observing that a total of 2.6 million people reporting those conditions are actually in work, and that is a credit to our mission to support people back into work, which ultimately is the best way to improve their mental health. I have a concern that following the pandemic, we have possibly seen a trend to over-medicalise some of the normal ups and downs of daily life. It is almost as though it were possible to live in a state of blissful utopia and that if there were any interruption to paradise, that is a condition requiring help. That is just not true.

The struggle of life defines us and builds our character. Taking away individuals’ opportunity and responsibility to face their fears by overprotecting them is the worst way to develop resilience, as any parent knows. The human condition is a state, mostly, of pain and fear. If we are fortunate, we will experience love and happiness in some small interludes, and we must appreciate those.

I want to be very clear, however, that I do not criticise anyone who is suffering from any mental health condition —I do not—including bad nerves, whatever that is. If we have a poorly designed system with poor labelling, it is not people’s fault if they respond to the structural incentives that we have designed, but we must not have bogus, badly defined phrases and cod psychology as a pathway to a lifetime on benefits. I really hope that the Minister will return to that in the summing up.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

Fourteen years of Tory Government and they still cannot find a Chancellor who understands poverty, inequality and the need for public services. Despite the latest one being a former Health Secretary, he does not understand health and the role it plays in our society. I remind Government Members that they cancelled the new hospital for Stockton in 2010, and health inequalities in my area have since widened, despite the tremendous work of NHS workers and others.

Today I will try to help the Tories understand the consequences of their 14 years in power: over a decade of austerity and, now, “somebody’s” recession. At the weekend I was appalled to hear that life expectancy in the north-east compared with the rest of the UK will continue to fall for the next 50 years. A report by the Institute for Public Policy Research North’s stated that wealth, health, power, opportunity and systematic inequalities are just a few of the reasons why the north-east is set to see the north-south life expectancy divide endure for decades. It stated:

“The number of years you can expect to live in good health in the North and Midlands would be two-and-a-half years shorter than the South and three-and-a-half years shorter than in London.

Extending these overall trajectories, the gap in healthy life expectancy between the North and the all-England average would not close until 2056/57 while the gap between the North and South East would endure until 2079/80”.

After 14 years of Conservative Government, nothing has happened to close the gap, and national comparisons are widening further. It is even worse locally. People in the town centre ward in Stockton are expected to live 16 years fewer than those down the road in Ingleby Barwick.

That news comes after reports of a huge increase in child poverty, people being unable to see a GP for weeks on end, dental appointments that are simply not available, and waiting lists for operations stretching and stretching. Some appointments for operations that took just a few weeks in 2010 now take many months or, in some cases, over a year. I welcome the new diagnostics centre being built in Stockton, but it is only one small piece of a very large jigsaw of provision needed to do the best for our people. The author of the report and IPPR North research fellow Marcus Johns has confirmed that urgent action is needed to tackle the inequalities. He said:

“No one should be condemned to live a shorter, sicker, less fulfilling, or poorer life simply because of where they were born… It’s hard to avoid the conclusion we are headed in the wrong direction on inequality in health, wealth, power, and opportunity while local government finances languish in chaos.”

Let me turn to another report demonstrating regional inequality. The North East Child Poverty Commission’s February 2024 report highlighted that there has been no child poverty strategy for England or the UK as a whole since 2017. However, the proportion of north-east children in poverty from working families has risen from 56% to 67% in less than a decade. The report also found that the intensity of child poverty in the north-east is getting worse, with one in five children in our region now living below the deep poverty line, and more than one in 10 north-east children living in very deep poverty. Almost one in five north-east children is living in a food-insecure household, meaning that they do not have access to sufficient food to facilitate an active and healthy lifestyle.

Children in our region have been let down in a range of other childhood health measures, having either the highest or second highest rates in England of A&E attendance, emergency hospital admissions, and hospital admissions for asthma, diabetes and dental treatment. All of those are associated with higher levels of deprivation.

On children in care, the north-east has the highest proportion of looked-after children of any English region—113 per 10,000 children, compared with the England average of 74. In the Tees valley, all five local authorities are among the 20 areas with the highest rates of looked-after children in England. Indeed, the link between high rates of child poverty and social care interventions was flagged by the 12 north-east directors of children’s services, which made a joint submission to the independent review of children’s social care back in 2021. It said:

“Exceptional levels of poverty in the North East are driving dramatic rises in child protection intervention and the number of children in care. The cost of this cannot be afforded. Exacerbated by reductions in government funding, spending on early help has reduced at a time when it has been most needed. This vicious cycle can only be broken by different ways of working, backed up by adequate investment.”

Do we not want the best for every child, whether they grew up in the south-east or the north-east? We will not have it unless every child’s basic needs are met. It is deplorable that the Government, with their failure to act, have become complacent, with children in my region going to school hungry, unable to concentrate, unable to learn, and unable to have the future for which they have the potential. I am pleased that Labour is committed to ensuring that all primary school children have free breakfast clubs that set them up for the day, so that no child starts the day hungry and there is a safe space in which to be supported with friends.

There is another matter of great importance to Teesside. There is one area where there has been colossal amount of taxpayer investment in the north-east, but sadly, those same taxpayers are being robbed of the benefits of £0.5 billion invested at Teesworks. My advice to the Chancellor is to get the forensic accountants to pore through the books and reports, and they will find tens of millions of pounds that could have been reinvested in the people of Teesside, instead of being pocketed by two private sector businessmen, after the Teesworks Tory Mayor gifted them 90% of the asset.

Teesworks is probably one of the most important projects in the country, but private individuals will benefit most from the hundreds of millions in profits expected over the coming years—individuals who are yet to invest their own money. I have wondered how the tens of millions of pounds paid out in dividends to those two individuals could have been used on Teesside, where all our local authorities are being forced by the Government to cut services and hike council tax. If those local authorities had just £10 million each, they would not have to cut services and our social care could be given a major boost.

The Chancellor also needs to look at the 28 recommendations in his own Government’s inquiry into the appalling way the Tees Mayor has been running his business— 28 recommendations because of the lack of transparency, poor value for money, and a total disregard for proper process. Recently the Mayor landed us with a legal action bill in excess of £3 million against PD Ports. It leaves the legal fees of the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology looking like chicken feed. If the Chancellor is serious about value for money from taxpayers, he would show the guts that the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities has failed to show, and order the National Audit Office to see exactly how the £0.5 billion of taxpayers cash has been used at Teesworks and who is deriving the benefit. I think he will discover that Teesworks is not working for our communities, and we have seen only a few hundred of the tens of thousands of jobs promised actually created.

In conclusion, we have had the years of austerity and we now have the Prime Minister’s recession. The ramifications have been immense: appalling regional inequality, poor health, and a cost of living crisis, but above all, poverty on a scale we should be ashamed of.