Spending Review 2020

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 3rd December 2020 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, I start with the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It says this spending review is “austere”. The dictionary says that is “having no comforts or luxuries”. That might be seen as admirable, when it is a choice, when you start from a condition of adequacy, but of course there is another form of the same word: austerity—something the UK knows a great deal about. We have had a decade of that prescription and the coronavirus has demonstrated the utter inadequacy of the economy, society and environment that that toxic medicine produced. The IFS notes, in this spending review:

“The … core … decision was to reduce public service spending, other than the £55 billion allocated for Covid, relative to March plans.”


That is on top of, outside health, a real-terms public service spending cut of 25% per person over the decade to 2020. What does this austerity mean in the real world? The abandonment of the manifesto commitment, from a year ago, to maintaining international aid spending as 0.7% of GDP means a girl in Africa—the continent from which we have extracted for our own enrichment so much in the colonial period and since—will not get an education. That will scar her entire life and that of her children. It means a family here in Sheffield, a family struggling to get by on universal credit when it had barely even heard the term a year ago, faces losing a £20 a week in April when they are already relying on the food bank now. Their house is cold now; they cannot afford to heat it. At Christmas, it will be colder still and the scant £2 billion of the green homes fund is highly unlikely to help them.

What does an austere environment look like? We already know, in one the most nature-deprived nations on earth. It means a failure to live up to the climate and biodiversity promises we made and the responsibility we have as chair of COP 26. We are not talking about cutting comforts or luxuries with this austerity. We are talking about leaching the lifeblood out of communities, out of lives and out of our natural world. Bloodletting with leeches is a medieval practice we should long ago have abandoned.