Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation
Debate between Caroline Lucas and Lord Tyrie
Mr Andrew Tyrie (Chichester) (Con)
I would like to start by thanking the House of Commons—[Interruption] —or what is left of it, as three-quarters of the House goes to lunch, and quite right too—for being kind enough to put me back in my job. I would also like to welcome not only the three returning members of the Select Committee on the Treasury but the seven newly elected members. We will be meeting very soon to examine the Budget.
I congratulate the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman) on her speech. It is an extremely difficult speech to make—probably for anyone to make in the House of Commons—immediately after a Budget that she has not seen. Of course, it is a Budget that I have not seen either. I note that in her speech she did not challenge the central Budget judgment—that is, to tackle the deficit. She did not say the deficit was being reduced at too great a speed. Of course, the Chancellor has announced that the Budget will be balanced in a couple of years, according to OBR forecasts. If the Chancellor succeeds, he will be delivering the pace of deficit reduction that Alistair Darling sought in his March 2010 Budget, so I do not think this was ever a great economic experiment. Like the decision in 1976 fundamentally to change monetary policy after the International Monetary Fund came in, this is something that both parties are beginning, slowly, to agree on.
Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)
I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for giving way, because there is a party here that does not agree with the consensus that appears to be building up. Today’s Budget will go down as a pivotal moment in the dismantling of the welfare state, with the Government’s own advisers saying that slashing the benefits cap will throw 40,000 more children into poverty. Can he say whether that is a price worth paying, when even the IMF has told the Government that low borrowing costs make austerity unnecessary, with the costs of paying down the deficit in this way outweighing the benefits?
Mr Tyrie
That was a very interesting short speech. The hon. Lady made some important points, which I will not have time to address, with almost all of which I profoundly disagree and with which—this is the point I was trying to make—I think a large proportion of the House now disagrees.
The new Committee has a heap of new things to look at as a result of this Budget: the Green Paper on pensions and savings, the £12 billion of cuts to the welfare bill, the living wage, the new fiscal target, the shake-up of Sunday trading laws, the inheritance tax threshold changes and the avoidance measures, among much else. We will do our very best to report back to the House on these issues, and as soon as we can.
The plain fact, which I think is widely—almost universally—accepted, is that the backdrop for this Budget is dramatically better than it was when the Chancellor stood up and the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham replied exactly five years ago. The Chancellor deserves a great deal of credit for having brought about that transformation in the country’s economic fortunes.
I think, though, that it is worth mentioning a few risks in the economy. The first, which I consider very important and to which the Chancellor alluded, is the euro crisis and the Greek problem, which has the potential to turn from a manageable challenge into a major catastrophe. Were Greece to default, the United Kingdom could not take for granted the relatively compressed bond yields that help to keep our debt service costs low. The second is the bursting of the stock market bubble in China. Thirdly, we shall have to adapt to the moment when interest rates start to rise, because it could prove a shock for those who have become too used to the idea that they can remain at an artificially low level.
That is without taking account of quantitative easing—£375 billion of it—which will have to be unwound. I want to put down a marker about QE, on behalf of Parliament. When it is unwound, it may make a profit or a loss, and that profit or loss will need to be examined by the House and the Treasury. It is a matter for us, and not exclusively for the Bank of England. Any losses that are borne by QE do not score against the Bank’s balance sheet; they score against taxpayers. I think it extremely important for the House to be closely involved when big decisions are made about QE.