Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Angela Crawley Excerpts

Tuesday 21st March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Angela Crawley (Lanark and Hamilton East) (SNP)]

The cost of living crisis is far from over and, sadly, this Budget offers very little to the people in Lanark and Hamilton East. Energy bills remain high, mortgage rates remain high and child poverty remains high, so if this is the best that the Chancellor can offer during a financial crisis of his own Government’s making, it demonstrates how perfectly out of touch Westminster is with the needs of Scotland.

The Chancellor spoke of ramping up welfare conditionality. This will only force more people into insecure work, offering no stability for future planning, and it is not enough to lift them out of poverty. The reality is that this has resulted in a series of punitive sanctions in relation to the administrative earnings threshold on universal credit. Does the Chancellor really believe that the solution to bringing about growth is to hammer down on sanctions?

The gender pay gap is still very much apparent, and this Budget will do nothing to address it. I fear that women are bearing the brunt of the cost of living crisis, and this is fundamentally unacceptable in 2023. Calls to reintroduce gender pay gap reporting and to include ethnicity and disability pay gap reporting have all but been ignored. So can the Chancellor really claim that this will achieve economic growth and be truly inclusive, as the Conservative Government appear to believe it will?

While I welcome an increase in the national minimum wage, it is not a real living wage. It will not be enough to cover the cost of living, and it will not be enough to lift people out of poverty. It will not be enough to give people financial freedom to meaningfully contribute to the economy. When will the Chancellor listen to the overwhelming calls from stakeholders to completely commit to fully implementing a real living wage?

The one policy I will welcome is on childcare. We all accept and understand that good-quality, well-funded childcare is imperative to drive the economy, to get women and parents back into work, and ensure that those who are in work stay in work, as well as to tackle things such as pregnancy and maternity discrimination and the bias against women within the workplace who are assumed to bear the brunt of childcare, but this is simply not good enough. I recognise that it enables parents, particularly mothers, to contribute to the economy, but lip service to childcare is not good enough. This could be a truly transformative policy: it could achieve real economic change, reduce discrimination, reduce in-work disparity and level the playing field for the gender pay gap, but this policy does not go far enough. I hope the Government will consider that it is a great policy, and let us drive it further.

I want to make a final point about the Government’s record in the last 13 years. Their dogmatic commitment to Brexit has cut Scotland off from our largest international trading partner. It has cut us off from access to the EU labour force, and businesses in Scotland can no longer afford the labour shortages they have been hit with in the last 12 months. The reality is that the cost of living crisis is not over. I am calling on this Government to listen to the SNP, accept the Migration Advisory Committee’s recommendations for a rural visa pilot, and allow those who want to come here to work and contribute to our economy to do so.

The reality is that this Budget has only further deepened the isolation that people feel. It has pushed low-income households into further poverty, created hardship even for those in well-paying jobs and forced people to sacrifice their basic needs to stay afloat. It has exacerbated the mental health crisis and pushed businesses to the brink of collapse. It has encouraged people into debt and forced pensioners to turn their heating and electricity off in the depths of winter. I know that this is the reality for many of my constituents across Lanark and Hamilton East and across the UK, and I am calling on the Chancellor to make—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

Order.