Finance (No. 2) Bill

Ben Gummer Excerpts

Monday 15th April 2013 Commons Chamber

[Sheila Gilmore (Edinburgh East) (Lab)]

The hon. Member for Macclesfield (David Rutley), who is no longer in his place, will be rather disappointed, because I cannot share his view that we have the best of all possible worlds. Perhaps his name is really Dr Pangloss. I hear an awful lot of Panglossian politics in Scotland, where it takes the form of, “If we were only independent and we waved our magic independence wand, everything would be wonderful,” but to get it here is astonishing.

The other surreal aspect of today’s debate, which would astonish anyone listening who cannot see the Chamber, is that we have heard from a grand total of three Government Back Benchers prepared to speak up for their own Government’s Budget. They were not so shy about coming forward last week to recall what were to them the glory days of Lady Thatcher’s Government. They were all very keen to come down here especially to talk about it. Many of my constituents thought we should have talked about that today, and perhaps we should have, since Government Back Benchers clearly did not think it worth debating the Finance Bill. Much effort and money could probably have been saved.

I was not one of those who came last week, because I spent most of the recess talking to my constituents. If this were the Government’s first Budget, not their fourth, we would be better placed to believe the words they keep using. We were told in 2010 that this would work—that we had a terrible financial crisis and that we all had to tighten our belts and get through it together, but that it would be worth it. Just how long do we have to wait? These Budgets and these Budget debates and debates on the Finance Bill are turning into groundhog day. The Government say all the same things and, I have to admit, they will no doubt say that Opposition Members all say the same things, but that is because the debate has not moved on. On this, the Government’s fourth Budget, we are indeed saying the same things. Perhaps that is why Government Back Benchers did not feel it worth coming—because they know perfectly well that there is no point in saying the same things because the Government’s approach is not working.

The Government’s answer to many of the criticisms of their policies—particularly their policies to reduce tax credits and benefits—is that people can get around those cuts by working more hours. In fact, they even defend a lot of their measures by saying that they will put a rod into people’s backs and get them out there working those extra hours. The assumption seems to be not just that unemployment is, as they allege, a lifestyle choice, but that under-employment is apparently a lifestyle choice too and that, really, people have to get up and go out there, and everything will be fine.

My constituent Joe—one of the many people I talked to in the recent recess—is affected by the bedroom tax because he was housed by the council in a two-bedroom house. It was not his choice; that is where he was given a house. He went to his supermarket employer to ask whether it would increase the 15 hours a week he works in his job to help to pay the extra amount. His employer said no. That might have been partly because, at 15 hours a week at the minimum wage, he is nicely underneath the threshold for paying national insurance. Doubtless his employer prefers to have another part-time employee at that level. However, even if his employer offered him more hours, at whose expense would that be? Would it mean that another employee got fewer hours or, if Joe was given full-time work, that somebody else would not have a job at all? Unless the supermarket wants to employ people to stand around doing nothing, one has to presume that it has calibrated its work force according to the work that needs to be done. It is not a charity. His employer is not there to give him a few extra hours so that he can pay his bedroom tax. It needs only the workers it needs. It is therefore a myth to assume that people such as Joe just have to get out there and everything will be fine. That sums up exactly what is wrong with this Government’s economic policy. Austerity reduces demand. Indeed, it has reduced demand all over Europe, which is one reason why we are not coming out of this recession through exports—one of the promises made to us in 2010—because everybody is in the same boat.

As Joe’s current employer will not give him the extra hours, he could, I suppose, find out whether there is another job out there. Perhaps he should see who else is hiring for his type of work in the city. I would stress that, compared with many other areas—such as that represented by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North East (Mr Bain)—Edinburgh does not have high unemployment. In fact, the unemployment rate in my constituency is only 4.8%, which in a lot of people’s terms would be very low. I thought, “I’ll look at the Government’s great new innovation,” which is a website called Universal Jobmatch. I do not know whether any Member present has looked at Universal Jobmatch—I have, on several occasions—but I put in “shop assistant, Edinburgh area” to see what would come out the other end. If I had been Joe, things would have looked quite hopeful at first, because there appeared to be four pages of jobs. There were 25 on each page—I counted—so I thought, “Well that’s 100 jobs. That’s not bad.”

In fact, there turned out to be 76 job entries, because the last page had only one entry, so things were not quite as healthy as I thought, but when I looked, I saw that 57 of those 76 entries were for a firm offering jobs taking out catalogues and trying to sell things door to door—the archetypal job that people often have to take during a recession. In fact, we can read all about that from the 1930s, which is where we are again—it is not the 1980s; in fact, it is the 1930s. Most of those 57 entries were not even for jobs in Edinburgh, and in my view they were not proper jobs. Maybe Joe should see whether he can make the extra hours by selling whatever it is he would have to sell. It is absolutely extraordinary, however, that 57 of the 76 job vacancies advertised in the Edinburgh area—which, by the way, stretches to Fife and to Falkirk—were what most of us would probably describe as non-jobs. Of the others, only six were actually in the city. If Joe were to apply for a job just outside the city, he would have to take on board the fact that it would cost him money to get there, and that that might negate all or part of any extra income he might earn. So there were six jobs in retail in Edinburgh, a city in which, we are told, unemployment is really not too bad and we should not worry too much about the state of the economy. That is not a growing economy. It is not a healthy economy. It is, however, the reality for Joe and many others like him.

I also spoke yesterday to a constituent who clearly understood how economics should work. She told me that she and her husband had already lost £85 a month in tax credits; their income had gone down. Her husband is a self-employed taxi driver, and she told me that because people were pulling in their horns, spending less and having fewer nights out, he was getting less business. His earnings were dropping. He was out driving on Monday and Tuesday nights last week, for five or six hours each night, yet he took in only £55 a night, from which he would have to take off his costs. She reckoned that people were not spending because they did not have sufficient income, either because they had lost their jobs or because they were on shorter hours. That is what low demand means. It has a ripple effect through a local economy, and people like that taxi driver who are working and who want to earn more cannot do so. He cannot make people take his taxi if they do not want to.

[Ben Gummer (Ipswich) (Con)]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Sheila Gilmore]

I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman, because he has not been here through all these hours or taken part in this important debate.

We have heard a lot about extra jobs being created in the economy. The Economic Secretary, who I understand is going to respond to the debate, tweeted during the recess that job creation in the three years of this Government was running higher than during 10 years of the Labour Government by a factor of 2:1. Those figures just are not true. They seem to have been plucked from a work of fiction. People are being told over and over again that that is what is happening, yet their own personal experience is very different. Joe cannot get extra hours in his job, and if he looked on Universal Jobmatch, which is where people are told to go to find jobs, he would find only six jobs in his field in his city. The numbers simply do not add up.

We know that some of the so-called jobs are unpaid jobs, and that some are jobs that have been translated from the public sector to the private sector. The real world is one of no growth. All the commentators have clearly stated that this Budget will not create more growth, as has the Office for Budget Responsibility, the organisation that we were told would be totally independent and correct. A Conservative Member even said earlier that he no longer believed in it. Actually, it is telling the truth.