Economic and Taxation Policies: Jobs, Growth and Prosperity

Baroness Fall Excerpts

Thursday 13th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fall (Con)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow my noble friend Lord Swire. I also congratulate my noble friend Lord Elliott on securing the debate today.

We meet at an unsettling moment between the Chancellor’s furious pitch rolling of last week and the Budget itself, which looms somewhat ominously. We must all “do our bit”, she said last week, and she is not wrong to call the nation together in a common endeavour. Were it truly aimed to deliver growth and create jobs, she would certainly have my support, but her record so far has suggested otherwise.

The fundamental challenge is that we seek growth at home against rising debt and welfare dependency, as we navigate an uncertain global outlook. In practice, this means that we have to deal with the complexity of an often-changing global trade climate, with its tariffs, export controls and import controls. Interventionist industrial strategies are the name of the game and the only certainty in geoeconomics is uncertainty.

So the question for the Chancellor is this: what is our response to these economic and social challenges? So far, we have heard little strategic coherence and nothing that looks, to me, like a growth plan. Right from the start, we saw the Government settling pay disputes without any conditions to drive productivity and reform. Then, instead of confidence-building measures for business to create new jobs, we saw hikes to NICs and an extensive programme of workers’ rights to be rolled out from day one—making it very expensive to hire, impossible to reassess and then difficult to fire. The stats released this week speak for themselves: fewer jobs, fewer hires and more unemployment. It is one of the worst graduate job markets for a generation. How is this helping working people?

In this age of economic nationalism, a key strategic question for the Chancellor should be what our competitive advantage is and how we are thinking about nurturing and protecting it. We are not a nation rich in raw materials; we are a nation of entrepreneurs and inventors. In other words, we live by our wits, not by our wealth. Just look at our record on start-ups: London ranks second-best place on start-ups tied with New York, yet we are seemingly not able to scale up. We incubate brilliant businesses only to have them picked off by foreign investors.

The solution is not one simple fix but a set of policies and cultural changes that require political will, whether nurturing our first-class universities, commercialising their research or backing risk. Backing a tech winner would be a game-changer. We can use public money, but at a critical moment. Backing talent must mean global talent, and it certainly does not mean implementing a raft of policies designed to show entrepreneurs the door.

I turn briefly to welfare in echoing the remarks of my noble friends Lord Bridges, Lady Stedman-Scott and Lord Petitgas. The rise of the cost of our welfare bill is alarming, but not half as alarming as the tally of wasted lives. Let us remember what welfare is for: it is there to support those who cannot support themselves and encourage those who can into work. Welfare is also about fairness—to those who need support and to the taxpayers who pay for it. Designing a system that encourages people, especially the young, to a life on benefits with no checks or redress is a tragedy for each person. It is a national disaster that we simply cannot afford. As Conservatives, we must support welfare reform at every opportunity, even if it means voting with the Government.

Taken together, the burdens on business, the policies which discourage entrepreneurs, the lack of strategic thinking for growth and the inability to tackle welfare mean we face the Labour solution to our fiscal woes, which is more tax. I cannot see where the growth plan is in this. I urge that we return to the simple but important principle of living within our means, not because we have the mind of an accountant but because we understand that the happiness and safety of our nation come from economic security.