Public Services

Chris Elmore Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2019 Commons Chamber

[Chris Elmore (Ogmore) (Lab)]

It is a real pleasure to speak in this rolling debate on the Conservatives’ latest taxpayer-funded party political broadcast. Let us be clear that that is what Monday was about. It was not about bringing our public services back from the brink after nearly a decade of Tory austerity; it was not about, at best, putting police numbers back up to pre-2010 levels; and it was not about investing in our communities that have been shown nothing but neglect under the Prime Minister and his two immediate predecessors. No, it was about the Prime Minister using Her Majesty the Queen to give us a sneak peek at the Conservative party manifesto.

With an ever diminishing majority at minus 45 and a sterling record of success on winning votes in this place, the only thing of which we can be sure is that we cannot trust the Prime Minister to deliver anything he promises in this Queen’s Speech.

If we set aside how we have reached this farcical point—if we forget all the procedural quirks and parliamentary game-playing that has led us here—there is one thing the Prime Minister has forgotten: the people. He says that the Queen’s Speech sets out the people’s priorities, yet when we look behind the headlines and the bluff and bluster that seems to surround everything the Prime Minister does, what are we left with? A set of pie-in-the-sky priorities that I have no doubt will not be delivered by our resident wolf in sheep’s clothing. A Government with a majority of minus 45 will promise the earth and get re-elected. The magic money tree, so lauded as a stick to bash Labour with at every opportunity, has received the JCB-full of fertiliser that it needs—not to start rebuilding our country, but to keep the Prime Minister in power.

My constituents in Ogmore, the people of Wales and the communities up and down our United Kingdom deserve better than the self-serving behaviour we are seeing from the Prime Minister. It is not even a matter of my disagreeing with the whole content of the Queen’s Speech; instead, it is a matter of trust. My communities in Ogmore know that the Prime Minister’s pledge to put 20,000 extra police on our streets is worth as much as the £350 million a week that he promised for the NHS on the side of his big red bus, or even the 40 new hospitals in England that have turned out to be just six. The list goes on and on.

The fact is that the thin slices of funding that Wales has been given to invest in public services since 2010 have rapidly become crumbs, and now, despite a sea of warm words and vacuous promises, even those crumbs are running out. My constituents were told more than a year ago that austerity was over, yet they continue to see prices rising while their wages are stagnating and their local services are pushed to breaking point. The Welsh Government, under the leadership of both Carwyn Jones and Mark Drakeford, have used every lever at their disposal to counter the Tories’ raid on our public finances, but nearly a decade on, and four years after David Cameron’s original austerity drive was meant to have ended, Welsh public services and the communities we serve are still feeling the full brunt of the Government’s economic incompetence.

Even if the recently announced funding is delivered, the Welsh Government’s budget will still be £300 million lower than it was in 2010, and that is even with the additional funding that the Government have now announced. So, even by 2020, the Conservatives would still not have put budgets back to the levels they were at in 2010, a decade ago. That is the truly astonishing part of all this: this pre-election distraction will not lift our country back to where it was on public service funding under the previous Labour Government in 2010. That is aside from any long-term economic plan for delivering public services. It is not just a number on a spreadsheet; it is £300 million a year less to spend on public services than we had in 2010—in Wales alone.

When we take into account inflation, our ageing and growing population, and the new challenges that our digital economy brings, we can see that our communities have been left to wither on the vine, while tax cuts for high earners railroad their way down the tracks. That has an impact on just about everyone in my Ogmore constituency: the 1950s women who are having to reach out to food banks; the families who have been made homeless because of universal credit; the young people who are seeing the strain on their local services; the public sector workers who have been given minuscule pay rises; and the leave voters who were promised that sunlit uplands would somehow emerge from the relentless downpour of austerity.

Optimism in politics is sometimes in short supply, but I fear that for some Government Members realism is stretched to its extremity. People have really suffered over the past nine years, and no amount of window dressing, viral social media ads or propaganda in The Telegraph should allow us to forget that. [Interruption.] Nor, indeed, should rants from the Under-Secretary of State for International Trade, the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart), who is sitting on the Government Front Bench.

I turn specifically to crime and policing. The flagship of the Prime Minister’s premiership so far has been his plan to recruit 20,000 more police officers. I have to say that this pledge would have made even the likes of Alastair Campbell blush, because when it comes down to it, it is just spin—and thin spin at that. We know that the Conservatives have taken around 21,000 police officers off our streets since 2010, yet now we are supposed to be grateful for a gradual rise back to the peak under Labour. I do not think so. Frankly, the pledge is an insult to the victims of crime who have been left high and dry by this Conservative Government, who were hellbent on accusing the police of crying wolf rather than dealing with the issues they have been facing. The people of this country do not believe the Government and they do not believe the pledges they are making. They know that they are false promises and they know it is time for change.