Budget Resolutions

Carol Monaghan Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)]

One group of veterans whom we talk about regularly in the House—I raised this subject with the hon. Gentleman when he was the Veterans Minister—are the nuclear test veterans. I have not heard him talk about them, and he did not speak much about them in his former role. Perhaps he would like to say a little about them now.

[Johnny Mercer]

With respect, I have spoken a lot about nuclear test veterans. I was the only Minister who met their group, and I have spoken about the fight to get some sort of medallic recognition. I reviewed the nuclear—

[Carol Monaghan]

indicated dissent.

[Johnny Mercer]

The hon. Lady can shake her head, but I did actually review the nuclear test programme medical settlement for them, and I improved it.

Nuclear test veterans are a part of this, but no one wants more than me to get away from the narrative that we do not treat veterans particularly well in this country. We are all incredibly proud of them, but this requires action and commitment. The Office for Veterans’ Affairs gave us the opportunity to do that, and I urge the Chief Secretary to the Treasury to do it. I know that he and everyone else on the Front Bench believe in this stuff, but we have to get away from giving money to military charities as though that will make us feel better. We have to develop a professional and profoundly different level of veterans’ care in this country, working with the third sector and others, to make people feel as though things are really changing for veterans in this country. I urge the Chief Secretary to take that forward.

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[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)]

I think the right hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) summed up the issues for many of us. The Budget should be an opportunity to reflect on the cost of living, but when we consider the reality of this Budget for many of our constituents, seeing how young people and low-income families have been hit, we see that it unfortunately misses the target.

Before I come on to my main points, I will talk briefly about the Ministry of Defence budget, which has been hit with a cut to day-to-day spending until 2025, a decrease of 1.4% in average yearly real-terms growth. We know who will bear the brunt of that: personnel. It is their salaries, their pensions and their family support that will be hit hardest. As we approach Remembrance Day, when we commemorate the sacrifice of so many, it is disappointing that the Government are failing to support those who are serving now.

More widely, the Budget is devastating to families up and down the country. It fails to reverse poverty-inducing policies that are pushing people into hardship. Although I welcome the changes to the universal credit taper, they do not go far enough to make up for the cut of over £1,000 to the incomes of universal credit claimants. As has been mentioned, the taper rate reduction will help only those who are in work, not those who cannot work through no fault of their own—because they are carers, because they have disabilities, because they are not able to access the job market.

Although the Chancellor acknowledged in the Budget that every child has the right to succeed, he missed yet another opportunity to address poverty, which remains the single biggest barrier to success in education. Without expanding the eligibility for free school meals, removing the two-child limit on tax credits and improving access to childcare, many children will sadly fail to reach their educational potential.

The Scottish Government, meanwhile, have introduced a number of pioneering measures, such as the Scottish child payment, free childcare for low-income families before and after school, and free breakfast and lunch for all primary school pupil. The difficulty is that the Scottish Government are giving and the UK Government are taking away. At the start of the debate, the Secretary of State for Education mentioned teachers’ wages. It is worth noting that even with the uplift, which will no doubt be welcomed by teachers in England, they will still be £3,000 less well off than their counterparts in Scotland.

I turn to the Government’s statement on research. I am sure that the commitment to increase public research and development spending will be met with some relief from many in the sector, but we have had no clarity on Horizon Europe. We have had nothing on how we will increase the opportunities for our young people to move to or work in Europe, or for European young people to come here. That is what the research and development sector needs most of all: access to talent at all levels, not just those who meet particular arbitrary salary thresholds.

There is no mention of tuition fees in the Budget. In fact, there is only one brief mention of the Augar review and no mention of the report’s recommendation that the

“cap on the fee chargeable to HE students”—

in England—

“should be reduced to £7,500 per year”

by this academic year. The Government seem to have conveniently forgotten about it. They like to remind us about their economic prowess, but what is happening is that massive student loans are putting young people into incredible levels of debt, and the Government are simply shifting their fiscal responsibilities to a Government 30 years down the line, when these young people cannot pay them back. It is simply a fiscal fudge and the burden has been dumped on the next generation.

Finally, as Glasgow hosts COP over the next two weeks, many of us would have hoped to see some strong statements in the Budget about climate change, but the Chancellor has not even paid token consideration to climate or the environment in this Budget. The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report provided a stark warning that the climate is changing in an unprecedented and damaging manner. We all know what our responsibilities are, but we are not seeing enough action. When our children and grandchildren ask us, “When COP was held in the UK, in Glasgow, what big steps did you take? How did you make changes that would make a difference to us?” I am afraid that we will look at this Budget and answer, “Not very much.”

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[Dehenna Davison]

I will not, because I have moved on from that point.

I particularly want to look at what the Conservative Government are doing to tackle the courts backlog. The courts have been really damaged by covid and it is absolutely right that we are putting so much emphasis on this: not just on the courts backlog in and of itself but on extra funding for rehabilitation and for our prison services, as well as for victim support, which again is an area close to my heart.

Another area that is close to my heart, colleagues across the House will not be surprised to hear, is the hospitality sector, which has faced a crippling 18 months so far. It has had unprecedented support from the Government through business grants and the VAT reduction, and one of the things that is going to do wonders for the sector as it bounces back is the further reduction in business rates to be rolled out over the next 12 months. That is a really positive step that I am incredibly pleased to support today.

Something that I know caused vast cheers on Wednesday was the fact that we are finally seeing substantial changes to the alcohol duty system. This is long overdue, not just because it is going to help the brewing sector and the hospitality sector but because it is a form of tax simplification, which is something that I, as a low-tax Conservative, am wholeheartedly for. My inner low- tax Tory let out a massive cheer when I learned that fruit ciders were going to see a reduction in duty as well.

[Carol Monaghan]

Does the hon. Lady not recognise that fruit ciders have been linked to alcoholism in children, and that it is not necessarily a good thing to cut the tax on them?

[Dehenna Davison]

I would say that it is a good thing to be cutting tax in general, but that has to be alongside a proper public health strategy to ensure that we are tackling issues associated with alcohol abuse across the board and, in particular, among young people.

My being low tax does not mean that I do not think spending is necessary, because spending in the right areas absolutely is necessary. There are two key things we can focus on. The first is spending on places, by which I mean some of the areas that have been left behind for far too long—for generations. I am thinking of places in Bishop Auckland. One thing I was delighted to see in the Budget on Wednesday was the levelling-up fund, which is going to see three key projects delivered in my area: we will be connecting communities through the Toft Hill bypass; we will be connecting communities through the repairs to the historic Whorlton bridge; and we will have the extra works for Locomotion in Shildon to improve heritage and tourism in my area and create jobs for the future.

My hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt) stole a bit of my speech, because he talked about the importance of investment in people and I could not agree with him more on that. For me, that investment takes two forms. The first is investment in good-quality healthcare, and the settlement the NHS is getting thanks to this Budget is astonishing. However, one thing I hope I can work with Treasury and Health Ministers on is finally getting the accident and emergency reinstated at Bishop Auckland Hospital. I have been campaigning on that for two years solid and I have no intention of stopping now. However, the billions of pounds to tackle the backlog in elective surgery is the right step forward, as is the emphasis on early diagnostics through 100 new community diagnostic centres. Those are positive things coming out of this Budget.

Investment in people also means investment in skills, and we are seeing £4.8 billion being invested in them. This is also about policy, and things such as university technical colleges and the move to T-levels. I must say that I agree with the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy) that we need to slightly rethink our policy on BTECs. We need to make sure that our young people have the skills they need, but we also need to make sure that BTECs are phased out in the most proactive and positive way, so that that will not have a negative impact on the education of our young people.

One thing I am passionate about is the lifetime skills guarantee, which is making sure that as our economy changes and we have become more technologically focused, people have the skills they need to get on in any future career, not just the one they are in now. Excuse my enthusiasm, but I used to work in research and development and one thing I am really enthused by is the Government’s focus on that. This is not just about R&D spending, finally introducing the Advanced Research and Invention Agency and R&D tax credits; it is also about the super-deduction scheme. The Government get slagged off all the time for supposedly reducing taxes on business when it is not the right time to do so, but this is incentivising investment in R&D. It is incentivising businesses to improve their productivity, and not just to create good, high-quality, skilled jobs which all our constituents can take up to give them a better life, but to grow our economy. As Conservatives, we know that the best way out of any economic crisis is growth, not spend, spend, spend—it is all about growth. The Chancellor has put a lot of emphasis on our future growth statistics. He also highlighted the fact that he remains a low-tax Tory. I am really trusting in him to stick to his word as we move out of this crisis.

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[Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)]

As politicians, we should always try to understand the argument from the other side. On that basis, at great risk to myself, I will try to look at the Budget and recent announcements through the prism of a Scottish Tory. That means, first, that I have to ignore the 2014 promises on pensions, when it was said that voting no on the referendum was the best way to protect your pension. It means ignoring those promises and then voting for what is now going to be a £6 billion-a-year clawback from pensioners. As the Red Book shows, £30 billion over the next few years is getting taken from the pockets of our pensioners. It seems the Tories are not content with just ignoring the WASPI—Women Against State Pension Inequality Campaign—women but are determined to make what is already one of the worst pensions in the developed world even worse.

If I am a Scottish Tory, I need to ignore that, and I need to ignore the £20-a-week cut to universal credit, but I will take great delight in demanding to know what the Scottish Government will do with the £41 million household support grant Barnett money that came our way after the universal credit cut. Let us put that money in context: each UC claimant is losing over £1,000 a year. The £41 million that comes back to Scotland, if distributed on a per capita basis, equates to a one-off payment of £85 per claimant. Yet we are supposed to be grateful for a £500 million cut being offset with £41 million.

If I am a Scottish Tory, I need to ignore the fact that as a group the Scottish Tories secured absolutely nothing from the Chancellor in the Budget. Instead of asking hard questions about why the Scottish carbon capture and storage cluster was overlooked again, I have to pretend I am really happy that the Scottish cluster is now a reserve. If ever there were a metaphor for the Union, the fact that Scottish Tories are happy for the Scottish cluster to be classed as a reserve is it. That is our place in the Union as it is.

The Scottish Tories have always been silent on the fact that Scotland has the highest grid charges in Europe. They have been silent about the £350 billion of oil and gas revenues that the broad shoulders of the UK have helped to spend without creating a sovereign wealth fund. They are silent about nothing being added to the Budget that matches the Scottish Government’s £500 million low-carbon just transition fund for the north-east of Scotland.

Because of the higher oil and gas prices, the Treasury is getting an unexpected windfall from the oil and gas revenues accrued. The Red Book confirms that, by the end of this financial year alone, the Treasury will have banked an additional £1.1 billion compared with the forecasts from March this year. Why is that extra money not being reinvested where it was generated? Compared with the March 2021 forecasts, the Chancellor now expects an additional £6 billion of oil and gas revenues over the lifetime of this Parliament. That means that, yet again, oil and gas revenues are paying for the Chancellor’s giveaways elsewhere. The reality is that with the extra oil and gas revenues, the extra petrol duties accruing from forecourts and the extra VAT from our soaring energy bills, the Budget was an opportunity to mitigate the cost-of-living crisis—an opportunity that has been ignored.

On the national insurance tax that has been imposed on us, Scottish Tories say, “Don’t worry—Westminster will give you back some money that you’ve already paid to Westminster.” Why are we supposed to be grateful for that?

Another fact about the energy sector in Scotland is that the Treasury has blocked the concept of ringfencing a pot of money for wave and tidal projects in the forth- coming contracts for difference auction. Such a concept would not even need a fiscal Budget line, and not ring- fencing that money could prevent world-leading technologies from scaling up and expanding all around the world. That is yet another matter on which the Scottish Tories and the Scottish Secretary of State are silent.

[Carol Monaghan]

I hope my hon. Friend is going to point out—maybe he is not, so I will—that the Scottish Tories support the SNP’s position on free tuition. It will be interesting to see how they vote on the Budget resolutions.

[Alan Brown]

I have trimmed my speech and have just trimmed that point out a wee bit, so I thank my hon. Friend for getting that on the record.

Let me return to energy. There is nothing in the Budget on pumped storage hydro—on which, again, the Scottish Tories have been silent—but hurray: tomorrow we get the Nuclear Energy (Financing) Bill. No doubt the Scottish Tories will troop through the Lobby to support that.

Let me turn to the levelling-up fund. Yet again, Scotland gets a cut of that, so let us get the Union Jacks out—“Hurray: we get a cut of the levelling-up fund!” The reality is that our cut is, in effect, based on the Barnett formula. When the Chancellor said last week that in the first round of funding Scotland is getting more than its Barnett share, all that means is that there is less money in the ringfenced pot for Scotland going forward, because it is all based on Barnett anyway. But as a Scottish Tory, I do not care, because I revel in the fact that the Scottish Government are being bypassed and there are small projects that we can put a Union Jack on.

As a Scottish Tory, I never acknowledge that the SNP has been in power for only 14 years. The Union has been in existence for more than 300 years, yet somehow every shortfall has happened only in the past 14 years. We must have quite a talent in reverse. The Budget still does not tell us what the shared prosperity fund will look like. It is supposed to replace the vital European funding streams that all the areas that have been overlooked by Westminster relied on to access vital funds for transport and infrastructure—and the Government talk about levelling up. We are currently losing out on funding and we do not know where the future shortfall is coming from, yet the Chancellor uses the phrase “levelling up”.

In conclusion, the Budget does nothing for Scotland. We have already seen, post Brexit, the damage that has been done to the fishing industry and to our farmers, despite the promises. More and more people can see that Westminster cannot be trusted, and it really is time that Scotland took full control of its own decision-making process.