Budget Resolutions

Andrea Leadsom Excerpts

Wednesday 27th October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Dame Andrea Leadsom (South Northamptonshire) (Con)]

What a fantastic Budget. It is fantastic for all sorts of reasons. It demonstrates how incredibly well our Chancellor and our Government did during the covid pandemic in supporting lives and livelihoods. The much more optimistic economic forecasts that have come out are testament to the effort that was put in and the result that we are starting to see.

The Budget is also fantastic for the support it gives to the leisure and hospitality sector, which will help businesses in South Northamptonshire. I thank my right hon. and learned Friend the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, who is sitting on the Front Bench, for that.

Many people wrote to me about universal credit, and the taper will help people who are in work and receive universal credit. Speaking as a former Business Secretary, the investment in R&D is superb. It will create the jobs—particularly the green jobs—and productivity that we want to see across our country.

The Budget is particularly fantastic, however, because of babies. I happen to be holding “The Best Start for Life”—it is not a prop, merely something to lean on. I thank the Prime Minister, the Chancellor, the whole Front-Bench team and many Opposition and Conservative Members for their commitment for many years to making sure that every family gets the support they need to give their baby the best start for life. The Prime Minister is totally committed to that, as is the former Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May). When she asked me to chair an inter-ministerial group to look at the early years, she was completely clear that babies are vital. On that inter-ministerial group a couple of years ago were two Ministers, one of whom was Rishi Sunak, a local government Minister, and the other was Nadhim Zahawi—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

Order. The right hon. Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Rishi Sunak) and the right hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi).

[Dame Andrea Leadsom]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. I should know that by now.

Of course, those Ministers have gone on to fulfil a fantastic pledge for every baby. I also pay tribute to parents and carers across England for their amazing contribution and their determination to have their voices heard and to make sure that “The Best Start for Life” works for all parents and carers.

I will take a moment to explain why that period of life is vital. Essentially, human babies are unique in the animal kingdom in the extent of their underdevelopment at birth. Every other animal can fend for itself pretty well from minutes, or at least hours, after it is born. Human babies cannot do anything for themselves until they are at least one year old, and often they are two before they can really fend for themselves.

The physical and brain underdevelopment of human babies means that they adapt to the environment in which they find themselves, so the baby who is born into a secure and happy home with a loving family will grow up learning that as an instinct for life. They will be able to do well at school, make friends, learn, get a job, hold down friendships and relationships, and then be a good parent themselves. Conversely, the baby who is born into a situation where there is interparental conflict, drug or alcohol misuse, mental health problems or severe deprivation will not have the same life chances. All the research demonstrates in spades that, for those babies, life is much harder. Their instinct for life is not good and they often go on to have all sorts of problems.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

There was a Sure Start programme that did exactly what the right hon. Lady is talking about. Does she now regret that that was abolished by her Government and that she voted to abolish it?

[Dame Andrea Leadsom]

I am glad that the hon. Lady, whom I consider a friend, has given me a chance to tackle that, because the standard response is “What about Sure Start?” I have paid tribute in the House to the excellent efforts of many Sure Start centres and I worked with hon. and right hon. Members across the House on that subject, but Sure Start did not provide what most families need. Unfortunately—I can vouch for this, having led a charity that had to pay rent to provide a parent-infant mental health service within the walls of a Sure Start over 20 years ago—Sure Start did not stipulate services for families. It was all about the buildings, and therein lies the problem.

With the Government’s policy of family hubs, I hope we have something that Sure Start will build into: a welcoming place where families can go to find antenatal classes, meet health visitors, meet other parents and get support, whether for smoking cessation, mental health issues or breastfeeding advice and so on. Multidisciplinary services will be available under one roof, not just physically but virtually. One thing that we learned in lockdown was the incredible value that parents placed on being able to take part in something remotely, whether breastfeeding support or perhaps dads’ mental health support. These things can very well be provided online and remotely in the 21st-century digital age, so that if someone’s baby is crying and will not sleep in the middle of the night they can look at something online rather than waiting for Sure Start to open. Unfortunately, in many cases, a Sure Start centre might be open for only a few hours a week.

I must take the hon. Lady to task, because there are 3,000 Sure Start centres in England as we speak. My hope is that local authority areas will use that as a foundation and build on them to create the family hub model proposed by the Government.

I want to move on to other action areas in “The Best Start for Life: a Vision for the 1,001 Critical Days”. I am delighted that the Chancellor has announced funding for every local authority area to publish its own Start4Life offer. One critical thing that parents and carers said to us in the early years review was that they just did not know what they needed, let alone how to access it if they did know. If someone was pregnant for the first time, why would they know that they might need smoking cessation advice, breastfeeding and weaning advice, support to avoid oral decay and help with brushing their baby’s teeth? They might need debt advice or nursery advice and so on. When someone first finds out the hopefully, but not always, fantastic news that they are expecting a baby they do not know where to go, so the news that local authority areas can publish and offer parents a range of Start4Life services will be transformational.

The third measure for which the Chancellor is offering money is a digital version of the red book. Many of us have a plastic red book, with bits of paper falling out. We forget to take it to health visitor meetings and to immunisations, so the record is incomplete. Sadly, having spoken during the research phase of the project to many foster carers, including some fabulous people who had fostered 40 babies between them, I heard that only two of those babies had turned up with a red book. Those foster carers knew nothing about what had happened to that baby, what the baby’s birth experience was, what the situation was with the birth parents—there was no information at all. That must stop, so in the digital age, a digital version of the red book will be a game changer for every family. It will be important not just for families to see what happened—when did I wean my first baby? When do I need to meet the health visitor again?—but for early years professionals. Very often, parents say, “I have had to tell my story six times this week to six different people. Why don’t you ever talk to one another?” When there is a serious case review, all too often it is a case of “These people didn’t speak to those people” or “This team didn’t know what that team was doing”.

Joining up services in Start4Life for the period from conception to the age of two is the big win in today’s Budget in my opinion. That will be transformational for many millions of babies across England. The next steps will be the implementation—it is not done until it is done—and I want to thank many colleagues and professionals in the early years sectors, as well as many Ministers current and past, for the extraordinary coming-together of views that meant that today is the biggest win for families.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dame Angela Eagle]

While I agree with the right hon. Gentleman that benefit tapers have been a long-running problem for many Governments to solve, we know that the 63% fall in the Department for Work and Pensions’ costs has come about not because everybody is in work, but because benefits are some of the lowest in the developed world, causing huge hardship and poverty. The right hon. Gentleman needs to recognise that as well.

This is a Government who love power but are bored with the hard work of governing. They disdained to anticipate the problems their ideological obsession with a hard Brexit has created, choosing to believe their own propaganda instead, but the red book shows that, as a result, trade with the EU is sharply down and projected to reduce living standards by 4%, which is twice the OBR estimate of the cost of the covid pandemic. Underlying some of our difficulties are the problems of Brexit and the fact that the Government did not prepare for the trade disruption caused by their hard Brexit deal, which threw fishing, farming and peace in Northern Ireland to the wolves in pursuit of their own peculiar obsessions. They did not prepare for the supply chain problems caused by the shortage of HGV drivers, the vacancies in social care and the staff shortages in the NHS.

This is a Government who have been unwilling to offer short-term temporary relief to those who are suffering the growing cost-of-living crisis, as energy prices have rocketed and as inflation soars towards 5% this winter. Fuel and food prices are rising fast, and people are feeling the pinch. An end to the public sector pay freeze will not compensate unless it offers real increases in wages, which, taking inflation into account, have only just returned to their 2009 level. Let’s face it: whatever it says in the Chancellor’s latest propaganda press release, any pay increase below inflation is actually a pay cut on top of years of hardship, so we will have to await the detail.

A fair recovery would start with a Chancellor who had the humility to be honest about why these blunders have been made. Unfortunately, we do not have such a Chancellor; we have a Jekyll and Hyde Chancellor, with his eyes firmly on his own advancement and with a slick PR operation to match his vaunting ambition—a Chancellor whose persona depends a bit on his audience.

To the country at large, he is that nice Dr Jekyll, brandishing his public spending largesse in a blizzard of pre-Budget leaks, increasing the national living wage and announcing the end of the public sector pay freeze—he is hoping that we will not notice that it was he who froze pay last year, on top of a decade of previous Tory pay freezes that have seen real living standards fall more than at any time since the Napoleonic wars.

But when he is burnishing his leadership credentials with Tory MPs, he becomes the sadistic Mr Hyde, posing as a true low-tax, small-state Thatcherite, waxing lyrical about his

“sacred responsibility to…balance the books”,

because to do otherwise would be “immoral”—he is hoping that they will not notice that he has presided over the largest increase in the size of the state in peacetime and the biggest tax rises in 25 years. That comes the year after he borrowed an eye-watering £350 billion in a single year to pay for his covid response. The fraud, the waste and the graft to Tory donors have been an ever-present feature of the bonanza of state mis-spending that he has presided over. In fact, it has been the very definition of “immoral”.

[Dame Andrea Leadsom]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Dame Angela Eagle]

No.

Does this Budget meet the formidable long-term structural challenges before us? In the short term, does it tackle the cost-of-living crisis now looming for millions this winter? No, it does not. Projections of 1.3% growth by the end of this Parliament are nothing particular to be proud of.

The Treasury-inspired blizzard of media propaganda announcing £30 billion of apparent spending commitments means that the Budget is really an afterthought. Closer inspection reveals many reheated announcements of previous Government press releases with one thing in common: despite being announced over and over again, few of them have ever actually been delivered.

There are some modest funding allocations that seek credit for restoring a minority of the huge cuts that have been inflicted in the past 11 years of this Tory Government —indeed, the Chancellor has openly boasted, over and over again, about taking spending back to 2010 levels. Having destroyed 1,000 of Labour’s Sure Start centres, this Government now expect credit for creating a pale imitation of them in just 75 places, 11 years later. Having cut skills funding by 50% since 2010, this Government now expect credit for restoring 42% of it, 11 years later. Having underfunded education for years, this Government now expect credit for restoring funding to levels that they inherited from Labour in 2010.

This is a cynical Budget of smoke and mirrors, aimed more at burnishing the Chancellor’s leadership credentials than at fixing the country’s growing challenges. As the challenges pile up like leaked Government announcements, it is becoming plainer by the day that this Chancellor is not going to be the one who meets them—and Britain will be the poorer for it.