Budget Resolutions

Andrew Bowie Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Steve Reed]

I hope the Conservative council will also be opening all the Sure Start centres that were closed because of the actions of the Government.

The truth is that if we look at what the Government are doing with the towns fund, for instance, which is something that Conservative Members like to talk about, we can see that it operates in the same way as a burglar, who first strips a house bare and then expects gratitude for returning the toaster. Blackpool, Darlington and Hartlepool are all getting back barely a quarter of the funding that the Conservatives took away in the first place, but Conservative MPs have nothing whatever to say about the way that their communities have been stripped bare by this Government.

[Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman has now been speaking for 10 minutes and I am yet to hear anything about what the Labour party would do if it were in Government and we were not. What would the hon. Gentleman cut that we are not cutting and what would he invest in that we are not investing in?

[Steve Reed]

I am looking forward to telling the hon. Gentleman that later on in my speech if he could just restrain his enthusiasm for one moment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Peter Grant]

During the previous time that there was a pro-independence majority in the Scottish Parliament, that majority Government did in fact open their door to discussions with the other parties, and the hon. Gentleman’s party was quite happy to take advantage of that. He may remember, in fact, that it was an initial suggestion from his party that led to the Scottish Government introducing and maintaining to this day a record of 1,000 additional police officers compared with the maximum number that ever existed in Scotland under the previous Lib Dem-Labour coalition.

This will be seen as the year the Tories finally ditched any pretext that Budget day has anything to do with the public finances, helping the economic recovery or sustainable growth. Budget day has become purely and simply a propaganda exercise for the Government, and particularly for the Chancellor. That is what the days and days of utterly inexcusable leaks were about—leaks that until 10 years ago would have meant automatic dismissal or resignation for the Chancellor. The Chancellor seems to measure its success not by how effectively it closes the gap between rich and poor, because it does not, or by whether it delivers on any of his party’s manifesto promises—that is on the off chance that anybody can find any that havenae been broken—but on how many favourable headlines he gets in the right-wing press. It is almost as if the Chancellor has worked out how important the right-wing press is going to be in choosing the next Tory leader in a year or two’s time when the present incumbent gets fed up with being Prime Minister and goes off to do something different.

This Government have a track record of spending millions of pounds on pushing soundbite slogans that are utterly meaningless. [Interruption.] I will give way to the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis) if he has got—[Interruption.] Okay, if he does not want to intervene he can keep his mouth shut. In 2015, George Osborne gave us a “long-term economic plan” that changed, on average, every three months until he resigned. In 2017, we had “strong and stable”, leaving Britain weaker and less stable than it has ever been in peacetime. In 2019, we had “get Brexit done”, which meant we all got done over by Brexit, and in 2019 also we had an “oven-ready deal” that left most of us feeling that we had been stuffed like Christmas turkeys. This month’s catchphrase is “levelling up”. Looking at the detail of this “levelling up” Budget, it is like claiming that you have levelled out the potholes on the road by digging a massive great hole somewhere else in the road to supply the rubble to fill in the original potholes. It is about filling in holes left behind elsewhere in our economy and in our public services by 11-and-a-half years of a failed Tory Government trying unsuccessfully to maintain a failed British state.

The Government want us to believe that they are making things better for some people without making them worse for anybody else. Some people will get a bigger piece of pie, but nobody will have to make do with a wee-er piece of pie. You cannae do that unless the pie is getting bigger, but the fact is that the pie is still much, much smaller than it was when the Tories came to power.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies said in response to the Budget:

“For most departments, the budget increases announced today will be welcome, but not enough to reverse the cuts of the 2010s.”

If the best the Tories can say about this Budget is that, with a following wind and a wee bit of luck, they might just be about be able to remediate most of the damaging cuts they have inflicted on us during their term of office, that does not strike me as a cause for celebration. That is why they will not see a great deal of positive responses to the Budget from those on this side of the House.

[Andrew Bowie]

rose—

[Peter Grant]

I give way with pleasure.

[Andrew Bowie]

I understand and respect that we have political differences on our respective sides of the House, but surely the hon. Gentleman can join us in welcoming the fact that this Budget delivers the largest ever block grant to the Scottish Government in history since the Scottish Parliament was created. Perhaps he can expand on how he will be pressing the Scottish Government to spend that extra funding that we have delivered from the UK Government to Edinburgh.

[Peter Grant]

The sad thing is that no matter how much anyone in this House presses the Scottish Government on their decisions, a record amount of that money coming back to Scotland has already been decided not by the elected Members of the Scottish Parliament, but by Members of the UK Parliament who could not get elected in Scotland. Record amounts of that money come with strings attached and conditions attached that tell the Scottish Government how they have to spend our money.

In response to the hon. Gentleman’s specific question about the amount, if he looks carefully, he will see that, yes, there are welcome increases for capital spend, but the day-to-day service provision budgets of the Scottish Government will continue to be under intense pressure. While we welcome the increase in capital spend, the Departments of the Scottish Government—just like the Departments of this Government and the departments of local authorities the length and breadth of England and Wales—will find that the resources to meet the ever-growing demand on their day-to-day services will be as tightly pressed as ever.

While the Government will try to pull the wool over our eyes and say, “It is all covid’s fault”, we cannot and will not let them forget that the British Government’s management of the economy during covid has been among the worst of the world’s major economies. The International Monetary Fund has predicted that the long-term economic damage from covid in the UK will be worse than in the other G7 economies. Even that does not tell the whole story, because while the Secretary of State rejoiced in the fact that we hope the long-term economic damage of covid will be restricted to 2%, he forgot to tell us that Brexit is twice as bad as that. I wonder why he forgot to mention that the long-term, self-inflicted damage of Brexit is likely to be twice as bad as the long-term damage of covid.

--- Later in debate ---

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

This is the first time that I have spoken from the Back Benches in a while and the first time that I have spoken at all in this place since the reshuffle, so I have a new perspective on the Dispatch Box: it is rhetorically the easiest place to speak from in this place, but intellectually and emotionally, it is so much the hardest. I hope that it is not too glib to recognise the responsibility that Ministers bear and to say thank you, and I hope that my gratitude makes up for now pestering them so frequently and shamelessly in the voting Lobby.

The second hardest place to speak from is the Government Back Benches, because we do not have the luxury of standing up and making empty speeches and claiming that everything would be better if a different party were in power. I hope that the three things that I have to say about the Budget are heard in the constructive spirit in which they are meant.

First, it is right, as the Chancellor said, that the Conservative plan is working: unemployment is down, employment is up, growth is up, wages are up, and we are tackling the tax on work that is the taper rate and addressing the cost of living by scrapping fuel duty rises. Those are all great things, but perhaps most importantly, the Chancellor has levelled with people. I believe, in both hope and expectation, that he and the Prime Minister are low-tax Conservatives. In an age when political rhetoric has too often been a way to veil talking about the hardest choices we have to make, the Chancellor has more than justified today’s tax rates while spelling out the path to lower ones in the future.

We say glibly sometimes that to govern is to choose, but these are life-and-death decisions, and I praise the Chancellor’s honesty in saying why taxes are where they are now and laying out a path for where he wants them to fall. If I could choose three values for my kind of Conservatism, they would be: honesty with voters on the impact of policies, a social desire to live and let live; and, of course, the low taxes that come with as small a state as possible. So I support that fiscal approach.

Secondly, I want to talk about levelling up. I would like to see even more money going into research and development, but I thoroughly welcome the huge investment that is already there, particularly in infrastructure. The most consequential impact from levelling up will come from digital infrastructure—from broadband, 4G and 5G. We have just hit the figure of half the country having access to gigabit-capable connections, up from just 9% when the Prime Minister took over.

[Andrew Bowie]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend’s work at the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and to everything that he did to improve the digital infrastructure across the United Kingdom. When does he expect more than half this country to have gigabit fast broadband?

[Matt Warman]

I had a little to do with it, but the truth is that it was the private sector that delivered that growth, and it is the private sector that will get us to about two thirds by the end of this year. Much of that growth is in Scotland; I know that my hon. Friend will take a particular interest in it.

Digital infrastructure, more than any one road or any one railway line, has a huge impact. I will never forget a teacher in Northern Ireland telling me that she had to teach at the pace of the slowest broadband in her class. If we cannot have equality of access to everything from YouTube to the rest of the internet, teachers cannot teach equally; that is what levelling up means.

My third point is about the speed of Government and public services. Ordinarily, tax changes take a while to come in, but the taper rate change in particular is coming much faster. In part, that reflects its urgency, but it also speaks to some broader issues. Whatever we think about its tax bill, Amazon is the pace of life at which many of our constituents now live: deliveries come the following day and supermarket slots are booked for an hour.

Government has to be deliberative—of course it does—but in the pandemic we showed that we can act with real agility. Our democratic pace is sometimes out of step with the pace that our constituents want, so I welcome the huge investment in further digitising the NHS so that digitally booking an appointment might feel a little more like booking for groceries. That does not mean that the availability of appointments has to be identical, but the ease of booking them and the way in which the Government interact with the citizen have to improve.

It has been easy to make those constructive criticisms, because I do not have to implement them, but Ministers do; Back-Bench MPs of the governing party are on the hook for delivering them, too. This has been a Budget that gets things done: it will fund better roads in my constituency, whether that is through the levelling-up fund or through the towns fund, and it will tackle the climate emergency as we find the path back to 0.7% and invest in some of the countries most affected by climate change. I look forward to the promise of lower taxes stimulating growth and helping around the world

What we say in this place matters. Budget debates, perhaps even more than Opposition day debates, often degenerate into Members on one side saying that everything is terrible and Members on the other saying that everything is perfect. Voters understand the immensely difficult choices that the Government face; I think perhaps we could sometimes level up the standard of debate in this place by acknowledging that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to speak in support of the Budget presented last week by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer. After over four and a half years in this place, and over 10 years involved at some level or other in Scottish politics, I am used to the SNP being able to manufacture a grievance out of absolutely nothing. The hon. Member for Glenrothes (Peter Grant) gave it a good shot tonight, but I was pleasantly shocked and surprised by his contribution. Granted, there was very little mention of the £176 million that the UK Government invested directly in local communities in Scotland through the levelling-up fund, and there has been no mention from those on the SNP Benches of the domestic air passenger duty cut, which I campaigned for, and which will support regional airports in Scotland as they recover from lockdown and the pandemic, though the hon. Member for Gordon (Richard Thomson), where Aberdeen airport is situated, is still to speak. I look forward to his comments welcoming it.

There was very little mention—the honourable exception was the hon. Member for Glasgow East (David Linden)—of the spirits duty freeze, which will support the Scotch whisky industry. There has been no mention from those on the SNP Benches of the freeze on fuel duty, which will support commuters, and help people in rural Scotland more than those anywhere else. Also, there has been literally no mention of the increase in the national living wage, which will help so many people across Scotland.

What shocked and surprised me was the fact that in answer to my intervention, the hon. Member for Glenrothes actually welcomed the largest increase to the lump sum given to the Scottish Government since devolution began in 1999—£4.6 billion on top of the annual baseline figure of £36.7 billion. It is the largest annual block grant, in real terms, in any spending review since devolution was created. It is almost as though, earlier today, the hon. Member, like me, read Mandy Rhodes saying in Holyrood magazine that the SNP have to stop being the

“winner at being a sore loser.”

In that spirit of cross-party consensus, I am reaching out across the aisle and offering an olive branch to my SNP colleagues. I ask them to join the Scottish Conservatives—not in campaigning to keep Scotland in the United Kingdom; that would be too far for them. I ask them to join us in calling for the Scottish Government to spend this biggest ever block grant better; join us in campaigning for the £200 million that was promised to the north-east of Scotland to improve journey times between Edinburgh and Aberdeen in 2016. Where is that money? Join us in—

[Richard Thomson (Gordon) (SNP)]

Will the hon. Member give way?

[Andrew Bowie]

I will not because there is not much time left. I am sure the hon. Member is speaking later, if not tomorrow, and I will look out for his contribution then. [Interruption.] He has already spoken. Well, I apologise.

Join us in calling for the Scottish Government to spend more money on education so that we can shrink the now-growing attainment gap in Scotland. [Interruption.] Join us in fixing the bridges in Aberdeenshire, which the hon. Member shouts out about.

[Richard Thomson]

Where is the levelling up funding?

[Andrew Bowie]

Aberdeenshire has not even applied to the levelling up fund yet—we are applying in the next round. Aberdeen city, which we have heard nothing of in this debate, has received £76 million to level up the city centre—something that I support and I really hope the hon. Member will add his support to as well. This is a Budget that levels up across the United Kingdom.

In this new age of cross-party consensus, which the hon. Member for Gordon is doing so much to undermine by shouting across the Chamber tonight, I would like to work with my SNP colleagues so that we can press the Scottish Government to spend their money better. In that way, maybe they will see that what the Chancellor said last week is true: that we truly are better, stronger and wealthier when we all work together.