Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Catherine West Excerpts

Wednesday 28th October 2026 Commons Chamber

[Catherine West (Hornsey and Friern Barnet) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Helen Maguire). There is much to be welcomed in today’s Budget speech. For me, it was solid but not flashy—it was from the man who has HP Sauce on his sandwich, rather than pesto alla Genovese or tapenade aux olives. It is a really good Budget for the everyday, supporting households, helping small business and doing all it can for our fantastic start-ups.

Today’s debate takes place in the context of the IMF having said that the fundamentals of the UK economy are solid: unemployment is down by 26,000 among the working-age population and productivity has improved. However, the cost of a barrel of oil today is $114. I do not think any other Budget over the past few years has faced that sort of impact on every single thing we consume as a country, so the timeliness, tone, careful presentation and panache with which it was delivered were a real pleasure.

In my speech on the Budget last year, I reflected on Attlee’s 1945 Labour Government. Labour rebuilt the country, built the welfare state, built the NHS and built council homes up and down the country, but this year, the more appropriate leader to reflect on is the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. He once said:

“I want to show that as a government we are sensitive to little points which may be trivial in the context of government policy but carry a disproportionate weight in people’s minds.”

That is the paternity cover for white-van employees that my right hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North (Liam Byrne) mentioned. It is the help that the children at Coppetts Wood primary school are getting with their breakfast clubs, on top of the school meals provided by the Mayor of London and Barnet council.

It is also the use of empty office buildings. Harold Wilson once proposed the nationalisation London’s Centre Point; that building ultimately gave its name to the homelessness charity Centrepoint, which is still going from strength to strength today. What price can we put on bringing somebody in from the cold to be given a night away from those freezing temperatures and served by people in our constituencies? Those people do not necessarily work for the council; they may be from the Museum of Homelessness in Finsbury Park in my constituency, the Muswell Hill community kitchen or the street kitchen on the Harringay ladder. All those volunteers do brilliant work with those experiencing street homelessness, and they have been in touch to say how much they like the style of our Prime Minister and the solid style of our Chancellor. I am pleased to see that £39 billion has been earmarked to deliver 300,000 homes from 2026 to 2036.

I know that there is a bit of gloom around the Chamber, but we can be positive about the fact that when the cost of a barrel of oil was down at $70 a barrel just six months ago, things felt a bit more hopeful. One of the things that is implied in this Budget is the redoubling of effort by the Foreign Secretary to use our might abroad to bring people around the table to talk about the link between conflict and household budgets. Even if we did not see a total cessation of violence, but at least people were talking to each other, we might move towards $70 a barrel again, as compared with $114 today. That would see things turn around, as the fundamentals of our economy are strong.

I welcome the Your First Home scheme, backed by £4.7 billion. Both Haringey and Barnet councils will be pulling out all the stops to ensure that everyone has a safe, secure and affordable home, and they will be working on those ever longer lists of homeless individuals. I also welcome the statements about assisting councils with the fiscal devolution road map, as it is being called.

I look forward to Dame Louise Casey coming forward with her plan. I hope that councils will be pump-priming their adult social care departments so that, together with the NHS and social care partnerships, we can see that national care service become a reality much more quickly. Barnet’s Labour-run council earned dementia-friendly status and has worked with residents on an engagement and co-production charter for adult social care, working closely with Unison and other trade unions. That is the sort of co-operation we want to see.

I have talked about why we need good housing and good social care. The final piece of the puzzle is good, well-paid jobs. I am incredibly pleased to hear that the minimum wage is set to increase once again under a Labour Government for 2.3 million of our lowest-paid workers. We often hear in the media, from different quarters, about the damage that the minimum wage or the London living wage are doing. We rarely hear from people who have had a pay rise, who think, “That really helped me this week.” I welcome that rise, particularly for people in entry-level jobs. They might have hoped to get on a career ladder, but through a twist of fate in their own lives, are on the minimum wage or the London living wage for their entire career until they retire. For those workers, these increases are crucial.

In 1967, Harold Wilson applied for Britain to join the European Economic Community. In my constituency, 81% of people voted to remain in the European Union, and they want me to point out how important it is to the UK economy that we get closer to Europe. We know that Brexit hit our economy, making it 6% smaller, and we all know the importance of allowing the Prime Minister to go to Brussels next month with as free a hand as possible. Let us not hold Britain back. What about our children and young people who want to look forward to travelling abroad and having experiences where they learn a language and meet other people in their region? They will then get to know the difficulties in Europe and understand what it means to defend Europe, and they will appreciate the opportunities that are out there. For our future prosperity and for our children, we need to be at the heart of that European debate.

Finally, today’s Budget speech laid out timely, carefully presented interventions, with families and small business at their heart. I like the style of the Chancellor. It felt safe and it felt like the right thing for today. As we see, I hope, an improvement in the international conflict picture, we will see an improvement due to the good fundamentals that this Labour Government have produced since 2024.