Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Andy Burnham and Kemi Badenoch

Wednesday 2nd September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Kemi Badenoch (North West Essex) (Con)]

May I congratulate the Prime Minister on his stamina? Three hours! [Laughter.] Yesterday, he faced 125 questions from MPs across the House. Of course, Labour and the Lib Dems just wanted more Government spending—that is, taxpayers’ money—but can he name a single spending request to which he answered no?

[The Prime Minister]

What I can say to the right hon. Lady is that I was quite clear in my statement about the need to get the welfare bill down. I do not want to be a Prime Minister who sees a situation where we have so many people in their 20s not in education, employment or training. I cannot defend that, and I want to change it by giving more support to young people, so that we start investing in their success rather than paying for failure, as we have done for many years under successive Governments. This seems to me to be one area where both of us can engage in problem solving rather than point scoring, and I hope that the right hon. Lady will take up my offer on that.

[Mrs Badenoch]

The Prime Minister avoided the question. He did not say no to a single spending request. Personally, I think it is delightful that he wants to make everyone happy, but a Prime Minister needs to be a leader, not a people pleaser. He is talking about working together on welfare. I already made that offer, but it does mean cuts—he wants to bring the welfare bill down by spending more money. Yesterday, the Prime Minister told the House that his summer of promises would be paid for by “reprioritising within Government”, so what exactly has he cut?

[The Prime Minister]

In terms of “what has he cut?”, tax is the simple answer to that question. Within days of taking office, I indicated that we would remove VAT from electricity bills. That will help people with the cost of living. Then, days later, with the support of my right hon. Friend the Chancellor, we said that there would be a cut in business rates for pubs, social clubs and live music venues. This Government are lowering the cost of living and lowering the cost of business, and that is what we will continue to do. I say to the right hon. Lady that that has to be fully funded, and those commitments are fully funded. We made an early decision to be clear about our priorities. Digital ID is not a priority for me or for this Government. We reallocated the funding, and we made those commitments as a result.

[Mrs Badenoch]

I asked what the Prime Minister cut. He says tax cuts. He has not said where the money is coming from. He talks about digital ID—[Interruption.] Yes, I know he said digital ID, but the Chief Secretary to the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Bristol North West (Darren Jones), said that there was no money allocated to digital ID. You cannot cut something that never existed in the first place.

Lord O’Neill, a close friend of the Prime Minister, said yesterday’s statement in the Commons was

“the last thing investors wanted to hear”.

Lord O’Neill is a serious economist. He knows what he is talking about. Sure enough, yesterday the cost of Government borrowing rose to its highest in 18 years. How does the Prime Minister plan to tackle the Government’s rising debt costs?

[The Prime Minister]

I say to the right hon. Lady that I have worked with Jim O’Neill for 10 years. Jim O’Neill always gives me candid advice. We do not always agree, but he and I worked together to turn Greater Manchester from a former industrial heartland to the fastest-growing city region in the country. [Interruption.] Conservative Members complain, but where are their ideas about growth? When they were in government, we saw 14 years of stagnant growth. We saw 14 years of debt rising as a percentage of GDP. I say to the right hon. Lady that the turbulence on global markets is because of that exposure that they left behind. We are turning the corner. In the first half of this year, we have had the fastest growth in the G7. Borrowing fell to its lowest level in six years. We are cutting the deficit faster than any other G7 country. I say to the Conservative party and particularly to the right hon. Lady: that is problem solving rather than point scoring.

[Mrs Badenoch]

I do not know what any of that has to do with tackling the cost of increasing debt. Collaborating with Jim O’Neill is not how we are going to get debt costs down, and he said yesterday that the markets would be worried. The markets are clearly worried that we now have a spendthrift Prime Minister who wants to say yes to everyone but cannot tell us where the money is coming from. He needs to pay for all his new promises, and he has a choice: higher taxes, more borrowing or spending cuts. Yesterday he said, “Change begins with honesty”, so will he be honest and tell us: is he preparing to raise taxes again—yes or no?

[The Prime Minister]

I say to the right hon. Lady that I have already indicated that my first moves were to cut tax, but like any Prime Minister, I am not going to write the Budget here. That will be a matter for my right hon. Friend the Chancellor. I also say to her that he and I took a deliberate decision to set an early date for the Budget, so that we reduced the period for prolonged speculation of the kind that she wants us to indulge in today.

I also say this to the right hon. Lady and, indeed, the whole of her new shadow Cabinet, the majority of whom were part of a Government that lasted for 49 days—a short-lived Government that crashed confidence in the economy and hammered people’s mortgages. She took a decision at the weekend: she removed a shadow Chancellor who said that the Truss mini-Budget was a mistake and replaced him with one who helped to write the Truss mini-Budget. Dare I remind the House that the Leader of the Opposition herself is on record as saying that Liz Truss was “100% right”? What else can I say in response to all that, other than, “God help us!”?

[Mrs Badenoch]

The whole House will have heard that the Prime Minister did not rule out tax rises. Instead, what he did was lots of point scoring. He says he wants a new politics; he says he wants honestly, so why is he pretending that a junior Minister wrote that Budget? The fact is that gilt yields now, the cost of borrowing now—[Interruption.] Labour Members are laughing; I do not know why they are laughing. The cost of borrowing now is far more than it ever was under Liz Truss. The reason why that Budget failed is that spending was announced before the money to pay for it, which is exactly what the Prime Minister is doing right now. He says it is the new politics; it is the same old Labour politics—tax and spend. He did not rule out tax rises, and what markets see is a Government that cannot control their spending, so the markets will charge us more to borrow. That means higher mortgage rates for families. It makes life more difficult for businesses, and that pushes up the cost of living for everyone. Higher borrowing costs are the biggest threat to family finances, so will he rule out any more borrowing that will make people poorer?

[The Prime Minister]

May I say to the right hon. Lady something I said earlier? Debt was rising as a percentage of GDP under the Government that she, and her new shadow Chancellor, served in. He was hardly some PPS to the DEFRA Secretary, with all respect to my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; he was a senior Minister in the Treasury on the day of the Truss Budget. The right hon. Lady mentions mortgage rates, and that was the day they spiked; that was the day the British public were hammered by the previous Government. We are taking the action needed to get debt down. This will be a Government grounded in fiscal responsibility. We will stick to the fiscal rules, but at the same time we will help to reduce cost of living pressure on our constituents. That is the approach we will take, and that is the approach that I suggest the Conservative party should follow, too.

[Mrs Badenoch]

The right hon. Gentleman is the Prime Minister now and he needs to answer the questions, instead of spending time attacking someone who has more private sector experience than his entire Cabinet. I asked him whether he would rule out more borrowing. He did not do so. We spend more servicing our debt than we do on defence—almost double. There is war in Europe. Yesterday, Germany confirmed that Russia was behind the attack on Leipzig airport. Tensions are so high that the director of the CIA flew to Moscow. We need the plan to hit 3% of GDP on defence now, but the armed forces will not know what they will be getting until next July’s spending review. There is a simple answer to this: cut welfare spending and invest that money in our defence now. Mr Speaker, the honeymoon is over. Isn’t it time for the Prime Minister to ditch the vibes and get serious about defending our nation?

[The Prime Minister]

I will start with the serious point made by the right hon. Lady, which is the announcement by the German Government yesterday in relation to the attack in Leipzig. That should unite the House in sending complete condemnation of that attack by Russia, and complete solidarity to support both Germany and Ukraine, and that position will not change.

That takes me to defence. The very reason I appointed this Chancellor to his position is because of his strong commitment to the defence of our country and to defence spending. We will fully fund the defence investment plan. At the spending review we will set out a plan to meet our NATO commitments by 2035. There is no problem with our commitment to defence. More broadly, the right hon. Lady has made a lot of accusations about what went wrong, but I go back to the position that she left. The country was not heading in the right direction. Now, we are heading in the right direction. Yesterday, I laid out a clear, coherent, credible plan for growth, based on 10 years of delivering it myself. This is grounded in reality. I want to take it to all parts of the country. It is all about bringing back a sense of positivity, a sense of possibility, with growth in every postcode. Let this country believe in itself again; let people have some hope. That is what this Government will do.

Direction of Government

Debate between Andy Burnham and Kemi Badenoch

Tuesday 1st September 2026 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Kemi Badenoch (North West Essex) (Con)]

Can I welcome the Prime Minister to his place at the Dispatch Box and take this, my first opportunity to congratulate him on becoming Prime Minister? He has been in office for 43 days, during which I have learned how he puts the milk in his tea and exactly what he thinks about pork scratchings, but I have not had the pleasure of asking him any questions. We are all grateful that he has finally found time to come to Parliament to answer some.

It is only fair to be gentle with someone on their first day at work, so I am only going to ask the Prime Minister a few very simple but very serious questions. I hope that he can provide me with some simple and serious answers. I genuinely wish him well as he seeks to live up to the dignity and importance of the role. I was pleased to see him in Ukraine over the summer, continuing the Conservatives’ world-leading support for Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression. That being said, I am also very relieved to see that he has not brought his guitar with him today. His predecessor stood at that Dispatch Box two years ago sounding very triumphant, having just won a landslide victory. What went wrong? Where is he now? Gone. That job is not as easy as it looks from the outside. Labour MPs have not explained why they got rid of him. [Interruption.] They are laughing, but they have not explained it.

We on this side of the House understand that the country’s problems will not be solved by lofty promises alone. In the end, the Prime Minister will be judged on what he actually delivers. This is a very different job from being Mayor of Greater Manchester—a job where he did not have to pick winners and losers, make difficult trade-offs, or have to worry about our national security. He does now.

A Government’s first and most important duty is keeping the country safe. The last Prime Minister and his Chancellor left an enormous hole in Britain’s defence budget. We know that because the current Chancellor quit as Defence Secretary over that black hole, saying that it could put British troops at risk. He said that there could be an attack by Russia on NATO as soon as 2030, and that not funding the defence investment plan reduces the readiness of our forces. Let me ask the Prime Minister very clearly: will he provide the funding that his own Chancellor said was necessary to keep British troops safe? That means 3% by the end of this decade.

Keeping this country safe also means defending our borders. The Prime Minister mentioned boat crossings, but we must be honest: boat crossings have not gone down because of anything that Labour has done. [Interruption.] They have not. We have to be honest. Boat crossings are down across all of Europe, and have been down for much longer. Let us be honest: the problem is still not solved.

The Prime Minister will have seen the extraordinary scenes in Ceuta over the summer, in which more than 70,000 people tried to cross into Europe. Many of those people would like to end up in the UK. This is not just a British problem; it is a growing global problem. Even Denmark is starting to send illegal migrants to other countries as a deterrent. That is exactly like the Rwanda scheme that the Conservatives put in place and Labour scrapped. We now hear that the Home Secretary is thinking about reviving a Rwanda-style scheme, so can the Prime Minister tell me—yes or no—if that is the plan?

Next, the Prime Minister must keep British people safe from dangerous criminals. It was interesting to hear the comments in his statement about early release. Before the summer, I sat with women who had experienced some of the most horrific crimes imaginable, and the perpetrators of those crimes were about to be let out of prison early. The Prime Minister told those women that it was too difficult to keep their perpetrators in jail. Then he changed his mind. The family of PC Andrew Harper appealed to the Prime Minister not to release his killers early. Again, the Prime Minister told them that it was a non-starter. Then he changed his mind. The Conservatives told the Government to create new spaces in the existing prison estate, and to get foreign-born criminals out of our jails. The Government said that we were wrong, but now they are doing both. The Prime Minister has had five different positions on early release in six weeks, putting the victims through hell with his indecision. Will he now set out a timeline for his promise to get more foreign national prisoners out of British prisons?

As well as keeping the country safe, the Prime Minister’s next big challenge will be making people in this country feel richer. The biggest mistake that Labour has made in office so far, and there have been quite a few to choose from, is that it has crushed our economy under the weight of nearly £70 billion in new taxes. The Prime Minister was not here for that, so I will give him the list: the jobs tax, the family farm tax, the family business tax, taxes on pensioners, taxes on workers and taxes on businesses. That is £3,500 a year for every working family. He says that he cares about the cost of living; Labour’s taxes have made that worse. Those taxes have cost people their jobs—thousands of jobs in oil and gas, and thousands of jobs in industry across our country. The recruitment market for new graduates is the worst it has ever been. There are 50% fewer vacancies than last year, which was already the worst on record. If the Prime Minister does not change course, he too, like every other Labour Prime Minister, will leave office with unemployment higher than it was when he came in. Can he guarantee, here and now, on the Floor of the House, that there will be no more tax rises in the autumn Budget?

The year is 2026, yet the Prime Minister said in his statement that everything has gone wrong since the 1980s. He is still complaining about Margaret Thatcher. I am 46 years old, Mr Speaker—I may not look it, but I am. He is talking about a woman who became Prime Minister before I was born. He is living in the past, and he wants to take us back to the 1970s. We Conservatives are for the future, not the past. That is the difference between them and us. His ideas are all about more Government control, more spending, more tax and more politicians. The Conservatives want people to keep more of their own money. We want businesses to grow, invest, expand and create more jobs. That is the difference between the Labour party and the Conservative party. His diagnosis is completely wrong. His theory of growth is completely wrong. He thinks that if the Government spend more money, we will all get richer, but that is not how this works. Companies are not leaving our shores because there is not enough government.

Another difference between us is in dealing with the ballooning welfare bill. Up and down this country, hard-working people are fed up of going to work and paying for their neighbours to sit at home with mild health conditions that do not stop them working. They are fed up of hearing, as we did this summer, that working in Boots is not good for your mental health—ridiculous. We are on the side of those hard-working, fed-up people. I ask the Prime Minister: will he stand up to his Back Benchers in a way that his predecessor never could and cut the benefits bill? It is a simple question.

The Prime Minister engineered it so that he could have as long a summer holiday as possible, so he should be ready with some answers. I am even hearing rumours that he does not want to do Prime Minister’s questions next week, but it is my job to ask him serious questions, and it is time for him to start answering. [Interruption.] I know Labour Members do not like hearing the questions, but they are going to hear them. It is my job to speak on behalf of all the people out there who want to know what he has planned, and it is time for him to start answering some serious questions. Governing is hard, but the country needs the Prime Minister to succeed. Where it is in the national interest, I will help him. He may find that Conservative votes come in handy when Labour MPs are too scared to do the right thing.

Britain faces many serious challenges to our national and economic security. There are difficult decisions to make, and they will show whether the Prime Minister is serious about governing. On defence, his own Chancellor said that 3% spending was needed to keep British troops safe; now, apparently, he does not believe that. On illegal migration, Labour scrapped the Rwanda scheme; now it appears to be considering a Rwanda-style scheme of its own. On prisons, the Prime Minister said that dangerous criminals could not be exempted from early release, and then he changed his mind. This country cannot afford a Government swerving all over the place. Labour has already tried government by U-turn, and it does not work. If he wants to be different from his predecessor, and wants to live up to the optimistic vision that he is painting, he is going to have to start taking this job seriously. That is not what we heard from the Prime Minister today, but that is what the Conservatives are offering.

[The Prime Minister]

I thank the right hon. Lady for the welcome that she gave me and her kind words; I appreciate the tone of some of what she had to say. I do want to try to work with her across the Floor of the House where we can. She mentions my summer. I notice that she spent hers travelling all the way to Rome to be told by the Italian Prime Minister not to do a deal with Reform. If she had called me, I would have told her that and saved her the trip.

The right hon. Lady was right to start with Ukraine, as I did. I mentioned the work of previous Prime Ministers in setting the right tone. Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak—everybody played a role in setting that tone, and it has been carried on by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer). It is a very challenging situation, but I was there to send a very clear message that with a change of Prime Minister there does not come any change in Britain’s approach. I hope that I speak for the vast majority of Members of this House in making that completely plain.

The right hon. Lady said that the job of Prime Minister is different from the job of Mayor of Greater Manchester. I can vouch that I know that now, after six weeks in the role. She was wrong, though, to say that in that role I did not have to worry about national security. I did. Within two weeks of taking office, I had to deal with the appalling terrorist attack at the Manchester Arena.

I send all my best wishes to those who gathered last night at the Heaton Park synagogue to remember our friends who lost their lives and the incredible efforts of Rabbi Daniel Walker and others to hold the attackers at the door. We all send them our very best wishers and reaffirm again, hopefully from all sides of the House, that antisemitism is a scourge that we should work together to remove from our society.

The right hon. Lady mentions defence. She is right to, because it is a changing and challenging world in which we live, but I say to her directly: I appointed this Chancellor of the Exchequer precisely because of his commitment to the defence of our realm and the arguments that he has made. He will set out at the spending review the path to honouring our international commitments in full, as I said that we would when I was before the steps of Downing Street.

Those listening at home will find it hard to accept what the right hon. Lady said about the boat crossings, which are significantly down—halved on last year. She said that had nothing to do with anything that this Government have done. That is plainly not the case. I heard an Opposition spokesperson on the radio this morning trying to find any excuse to justify the numbers going down—the weather and all kinds of things. Can they not just accept that the action that we are taking is making progress? That includes the co-operation with the French that I mentioned. The Home Secretary and I will continue to look at all measures, and will be relentless in making sure that we continue to make progress, but the Conservatives would do well to recognise that significant progress has indeed been made.

On the early release of prisoners, I do not think there is any moral high ground for any party in this House. The Justice Secretary will shortly make a statement and lay out the timeline for the return of foreign national offenders. I hope that we can work together on the question of imprisonment for public protection sentences. Too often, issues in this House just get left. I left 10 years ago worried about this issue, and I come back to find that it is not resolved. Social care was something that I spoke about a lot when I left. I come back, and it is not resolved. We have to do better, don’t we? We have to find more ways of working across the House and not just leave issues unresolved with all the harm that that causes.

On growth, I cut tax twice in my first week. I say to the right hon. Lady that I am committed to bringing down the welfare bill not through crude cuts but in a way that provides the right support for people—particularly young people—whom, in my view, the education system has let down.

The right hon. Lady mentioned the 1980s, the legacy of which, I have to say to her, we are still struggling to reverse. It is the reason why—[Interruption.] Well, let us have the argument in this House. Why are people paying such high water bills, while the infrastructure is crumbling before our eyes? Why are energy bills in this country the highest in Europe? Why do Opposition Members represent constituencies where, year after year, bus services have been cut and the fares have gone up? They know the truth of what I am saying. Let us have some honesty so that we can deal with these issues properly.

The right hon Lady raised an ideological point. I noticed that yesterday she appointed a new shadow Cabinet, with a new shadow Chancellor—the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Andrew Griffith); I welcome him to his position—who I believe was the author of the mini-Budget. [Interruption.] I think at least half the shadow Cabinet supported the Liz Truss Government. The right hon. Lady said that I have been in my position for 43 days. Well, may I turn that around? In six days, this Government will have outlived the Truss Government, and we will be here for a lot, lot longer.

I will work with the right hon. Lady where I can—we should make that commitment to each other today—but I will still point out where she is wrong. We will not take lectures when the country is moving in the right direction. You can see that on the economy, on small boat crossings and on the cost of living. We will continue to do that to turn this country around.