Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Andrew Jones Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd March 2021 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Jones (Harrogate and Knaresborough) (Con)]

The Chancellor has one of the hardest tasks that any Chancellor has faced in decades, with economic circumstances more typically associated with wartime, but with this Budget, he has shown vision and I congratulate him.

The first key theme was the welcome and necessary extension to the support given to families and businesses. It is huge in scale and I would like to put on record the fact that I am very pleased that this support will continue. The extension of furlough, business rates holidays, self-employed grants and universal credit are all very welcome.

Harrogate and Knaresborough has a significant hospitality and tourism sector, which has been badly affected by the pandemic. High-quality businesses have been utterly unable to trade, so I was very pleased to see the VAT cut to 5% extended to 30 September and will then be down at 12.5% for a further six months after that. That reduction will boost demand. Boosting domestic tourism will certainly help, but there is also significant pent-up local demand that the measure will help to unlock, thereby underpinning thousands of jobs.

Rather than comment on the Budget as a whole, I wish to comment on just two areas. First, I was pleased that the north has been chosen as the base for a UK first: the national infrastructure bank, the creation of which is very positive. We knew it was coming, but I did not know it was going to be based in Leeds. It is great news for the city and will bolster its established financial services and legal hubs. As the bank will serve the rest of the UK, we need the eastern leg of HS2 to connect to Leeds and must make sure that can happen more easily. As the Chancellor said, the bank will have an initial capitalisation of £12 billion. We will see investment in public and private projects and it will be a driver of green growth, which leads me to the second area on which I wish to comment.

On environmental initiatives, I like the Budget’s continued focus on offshore wind and the investment hubs in Humberside and Teesside, but what also caught my eye was the launch of a green savings product—a retail product of which we can all take advantage—and I look forward to the detail on that. The people of Harrogate and Knaresborough want to see progress on the environment.

I conclude by commending the Chancellor on his Budget. The scale and speed of the response to the crisis has been astonishing—£407 billion is a remarkable figure—but I also welcome the clarity on the longer-term position of our public finances. Conservative Members know that the Chancellor is in a position to respond as well as he has done because of the repair work done over the past decade. A moment ago, my hon. Friend the Member for Weston-super-Mare (John Penrose) highlighted the fact that we have had two supposedly once-in-a-century events in just over 10 years. The lesson is that financial responsibility allows Governments to respond to crises, and to respond at scale. It will be a tough job to repair the public finances after this pandemic, so it was good to see the focus on growth in the short, medium and long term.