Budget Resolutions

Chris Stephens Excerpts

Monday 11th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Wes Streeting]

My hon. Friend asks an excellent question, and it is one that the Government will have to answer, because we are not having this double standards in politics. If the Labour party had announced unfunded commitments of this kind, the Conservatives would be the first to howl and complain, and it would be the question confronting every Labour spokesperson on every broadcast platform and every national newspaper. This is the question that should be levelled at the Government, because this is not just hypothetical recklessness; we have seen where the Conservatives’ ideological recklessness led our country, through a disastrous mini-Budget, for which they have never apologised, never taken responsibility and apparently never learned the lessons. It is a disgrace.

If the money is not coming from the sources that my hon. Friend the Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne) suggested, in terms of pensions and support, let us bear in mind the scale of £46 billion. It is a quarter of the NHS budget. Is that where the money for abolishing national insurance will come from? The Government would have to close 130 hospitals and sack 96,000 nurses, 37,000 doctors and 7,000 GPs. Will these cuts be evenly spread across the country, or will they just shut down the NHS in the west midlands and Yorkshire, leaving the rest of the country untouched? They are very welcome to tell us when this policy will be introduced, how they will fund it and where the cuts or the alternative tax rises will come from, because we will hound them with these questions every day of the general election campaign.

[Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)]

Some of that £46 billion could have been allocated to compensation payments for those affected by infected blood. Does the hon. Gentleman share my concern that the Budget did not mention infected blood and that those who are impacted feel very frustrated and very angry at the Government’s delays in dealing with the issue?

[Wes Streeting]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who brings me to the next section of my speech. Infected blood is another crucial detail missing from the Budget. Where is the compensation for the victims of the contaminated blood scandal? The Prime Minister acknowledged that this is an appalling tragedy, and he promised that he will speed up the award of compensation. Sir Brian Langstaff gave final recommendations on compensation in April 2023, almost an entire year ago. Why can the Prime Minister act quickly to help the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology with her legal fees but drags his feet when it comes to helping the poor victims of this scandal?

We should be in no doubt that the Chancellor allocated no money and has not left enough headroom in his Budget to meet the levels of compensation likely to be required, so what is his plan? Is he going to break his fiscal rules or break his promise to the victims? Which is it? It is not a hypothetical question, and I think people would like an answer from the Government on the contaminated blood scandal. We have heard the warm words and we have heard the commitment. In fact, the Prime Minister said he is acting speedily. I would love to see him in snail mode, but this is serious. People are dying without compensation.

The Government are now floating the idea of an autumn general election, bottling it on a 2 May general election. Are they seriously saying that this will drag on into the autumn for a new Government to pick up the pieces? That is what it looks like to me, and I think it is shameful. Given everything the Chancellor has said about this scandal, and given his role as this country’s longest-serving Secretary of State for Health under this Conservative Government, I think it is a real shame on him.

Finally, I turn to the NHS. In announcing the productivity review, the Chancellor admitted something that Labour has been arguing for some time, that the Conservatives have failed to reform our public services and that they have hiked taxes on working people, wasted taxpayers’ money and delivered poor services. In short, under the Conservatives we are paying more and getting less. Now the Chancellor wants us to trust the arsonists to put out the fire they started.

The Chancellor promised a crackdown on agency spend:

“For too long staffing agencies have been able to rip off the NHS by charging extortionate hourly rates which cost billions of pounds a year and undermine staff working hard to deliver high-quality care. The tough new controls on spending that we’re putting in place will help the NHS improve continuity of care for patients and invest in the frontline—while putting an end to the days of unscrupulous companies charging up to £3,500 a shift for a doctor.”

I agree with every word he said, but it was not from the Budget speech. It was from a speech in 2015, nine years ago, when he was Health Secretary. What has changed? Last year the NHS spent £3.5 billion on agency staff—£5,200 for a single doctor’s shift. The taxpayer is getting ripped off worse than ever before, because the Chancellor refused to train the doctors and nurses our NHS needs. Just last year, the Conservatives poured an extra £400 million into agency staff. Why? Because they have forced NHS doctors and nurses out on the worst strikes the NHS has ever seen, and the Budget confirmed that they have no plan to end this chaos. The truth is that the Prime Minister would much rather blame poor performance on NHS staff than the abysmal failure of 14 years of Conservative government.

The Chancellor promised new artificial intelligence technology for the NHS. We will add that to the long list of Labour’s plans that the Government are adopting. This is a man who promised in 2013 that the NHS would go paperless. Four years later—I am not joking—he said:

“I am quite relieved that most people seem to have forgotten that I made that promise.”

Well, the country has not forgotten that record. It is 2024 and the NHS still runs on pagers, fax machines and paper records. The Chancellor’s failure left the NHS with the longest waiting lists and the lowest patient satisfaction in history. Now the butcher of the NHS is back, and he wants five more years to finish the job. The hon. Member for Loughborough (Jane Hunt) was named and shamed by the Chancellor as playing a role in drafting the Budget. The question is: where was the plan to cut NHS waiting lists? There are 125,000 patients waiting in Leicestershire, so why did she not ask the Chancellor for something to help her constituents who need treatment today?

The last Labour Government delivered the shortest waiting times and highest patient satisfaction in NHS history. We did it through investment and reform. We did it before, and we will do it again. At the next general election, the question that people across Britain will ask is: after 14 years of Conservative government, are they and their families better off? Are our public services better off? In fact, is anything working better today than it did 14 years ago? Let me help them out: one institution is working better than at any point in the past 14 years, and that is the Labour party. It is the only party with a plan to deliver Britain out of the mess that the Government have made. It is the only party that has a strong leader, with a united party behind him.

If the magpies on the Conservative Benches are looking for more plans to adopt before their time runs out, they could adopt our planning reforms to get Britain building again; our industrial strategy, which sees Government and business working hand in hand to get our economy growing again; our national wealth fund to harness investment in the green jobs of the future; our plan to switch on GB Energy, in order to invest in our energy security; our plan to insulate 5 million homes, bringing down household energy bills for good; our plan to get Britain back to work, because we understand that we can build a healthy economy only with a healthy society; and our plan to get millions off NHS waiting lists, back in work and free to live their life to the full.

We will have 2 million more appointments a year, at evenings and weekends, to cut waiting lists; we will double the number of AI-enabled scanners in our NHS to diagnose people faster; we will have 700,000 more urgent dental appointments a year, and reform the NHS dentistry contract; we will have 8,500 more mental health professionals, with a community mental health hub in every community and mental health support in every primary and secondary school in the country. That is what a plan for growth looks like. It is a plan for the NHS, too. That is what the Budget would have looked like if Labour were in office and the shadow Chancellor was sat in the Treasury. That is the change our country needs. It is time for a general election, so that we can put the British people out of their misery and have a Labour Government who can give Britain its future back.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)]

It is usually the Monday of a Budget debate on which the details start to unravel, but just as with the selective amnesia that took hold in September and October 2022, this Budget sort of unravelled as soon as the Chancellor sat down. That was not because of the enthusiasm of his delivery—he sounded very much like a bored train announcer—but because of the three disgraceful omissions from the Budget.

We in this Parliament know that there are at least three issues that this Parliament should deal with before it ends. The first, of course, is the infected blood scandal and compensation; the second is the Post Office scandal and compensation for those caught up in that; and the third, as we will discover in a debate tomorrow, is 1950s-born women. Those are three big-ticket-expenditure items of compensation that will have to be delivered. If this Parliament did that, it might well be known as the justice Parliament, but the people caught up in those three issues are angry that £46 billion of unfunded tax cuts have been given away—probably at their expense, they believe, because there was no mention of those injustices and how to correct them. It is no wonder that so many furious people caught up in those scandals have reacted to the Budget in the way they have.

Today’s debate has been dominated by two worlds: the Government world, described by Members on the Conservative Benches, and the real world, described by hon. Members on the Opposition Benches. I noticed that not one Government Member mentioned the fact that the tax gap for those who should pay corporation tax has increased over the past couple of years. There may well be reasons for that; let us explore one of them. Perhaps if the Government gave the same funding to the operations in His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs that are responsible for going after the wealthy as they do to those dealing with social security fraud, and employed the same number of people to do both, the corporation tax gap would not be increasing, but would have reduced.

However, the main and fundamental difference between Members on the Opposition Benches and those on the Government Benches is that the latter do not understand what is happening in the country. People look at their energy bills, and see the energy companies’ profits skyrocketing. They look at banks’ profits, and they notice that their bank branches are closing and that their mortgages are increasing. They look at the ramping up of insurance premiums, and the insurance companies’ profits increasing. Then they see that the cost of food in supermarkets is going up to an astronomical level—and so are the supermarkets’ profits.

These vast profits have not reduced prices. It is supposed to be the great Conservative party theory that if companies make vast profits, prices will reduce, but that has not happened in this cost of living crisis. That is why I believe, as my hon. Friends do, that we really need to start looking at an excess profits tax. Until we do, people out there will feel that the Government are treating them as fools. It is time for the companies making these vast profits to start paying their fair share.

We have heard from Government Members that work has to pay. That is fascinating, coming from the Government as an employer. The simple fact is that tens of thousands of workers employed by the state—by, for example, the Department for Work and Pensions or HMRC—believe that their employer, the Government, is a minimum-wage employer, because the only time they get an increase in their pay is when the so-called national living wage increases. It is unsustainable when those working for the state to administer and deliver social security benefits are on pay that is so low that they receive those same social security benefits, and that is a fact that no Government Member can deny.

If the Government really want a serious conversation about making work pay, perhaps they can review their public sector pay policy. Public sector pay is not a burden on the state or the taxpayer; when the Government pay proper wages, people spend them in the private sector economy. If the Government really want to grow the economy, they could start by paying their workers better.