Charter for Budget Responsibility

Chris Leslie Excerpts

Wednesday 26th March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Leslie (Nottingham East) (Lab/Co-op)]

The debate has been all too short, so let me briefly reiterate to the House that the Opposition support capping social security spending—an approach that my right hon. Friend the Leader of the Opposition first proposed in June 2013. Welfare expenditure is the largest part of total Government spending and it is now £13 billion higher than the Chancellor planned in his first spending review in 2010. We must get a grip of these rising costs but do so in a fair way—tough on welfare inflation but tough on the causes of welfare inflation as well.

The Government might not realise it, but low wages and job insecurity are pushing the welfare bill higher and higher. The collapse in earnings during this cost of living crisis has hit the taxpayer too. Rising rents and the lack of housing supply push up the housing benefit bill. We need action on house building and a help to build scheme far more urgently than ever before. And long-term youth unemployment has doubled under these Ministers, costing the taxpayer more in benefits but also losing revenue to the Exchequer.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Chris Leslie]

I am afraid I will not give way because we have very little time. I have to give the Chief Secretary some time to try to make some sense of his proposals.

It is no wonder, I say to the Ministers, that in just the four months since the December autumn statement, they have had to revise their projections for welfare spending. In the Budget on Wednesday, they had to revise up predicted social security spending for next year by a further £1 billion and revise up the expected bill for the year after that, 2015-16, by another £1 billion. Controlling welfare inflation will mean tough decisions, such as ending the winter allowance for the richest 5% of pensioners, but we cannot afford the waste and ineptitude of the current Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, who cannot even be bothered to come back into the Chamber for the end of this debate. That Secretary of State has squandered £34 million by scrapping the Department for Work and Pensions inquiry service, in an astonishing waste of taxpayers’ money. He has written off millions of pounds of universal credit IT spending at an alarming rate. He has failed to tackle fraud and tackle the error and overpayments made by his Department of £700 million last year. The country and the taxpayer need protecting from the failures and the incompetence of this Chancellor and this Tory-led Government.

On the modified charter before us, why have the Government not taken the opportunity to revise the OBR’s mandate to allow the independent audit of policy costings and commitments in the manifestos of the main political parties? Perhaps the Chief Secretary can explain why the Government withdrew their first version of the motion last week, which could have allowed an amendment on that matter, and then hastily retabled a fresh version, which was not amendable. I wonder why they did that.

On the wider set of fiscal targets, will the Chief Secretary explain why the Treasury want to reiterate, in their charter today, the particular points on which they fail? If they want to restate the promise that they originally made to get the national debt falling by next year, be our guest. The motion before us today serves to remind the world of their failure to get the national debt down in 2015-16, and as the OBR said last week,

“We expect public sector net debt”

still to be rising in that year.

So the fiscal mandate is already in tatters. It had expired even before today’s debate. Is the Chancellor even aware of what he is doing? In his Budget speech on Wednesday he used the phrase,

“as a nation, we are getting on top of our debts”.—[Official Report, 19 March 2014; Vol. 577, c. 781.]

Does he not even realise that he has increased the national debt by a third—£1.2 trillion?

A new fiscal mandate will be needed in the new Parliament and we will obtain just that. We will balance the books and get the current budget into surplus as soon as possible in the next Parliament—a fairer approach to deficit reduction and tough on the causes of welfare inflation. We need long-term recovery and long-term growth, not the same old short-term politicking from the Chancellor. Sound management and stronger control are necessary to prove to taxpayers that the important safety net of social security for the vulnerable and those in need is sustainable for the longer term, so we will support the motion, should the House divide.