Budget Resolutions

Clive Lewis Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Clive Lewis (Norwich South) (Lab)]

One of my favourite quotes of all time is from Henry Kissinger to, I think, the US press corps. He said:

“Does anyone have any questions for my answers?”

That has always tickled me. I looked at the Budget headings, and I wondered, “Do the Government have a Budget debate heading for my speech?” Unfortunately, they do on public services.

Sometimes in a debate, it is important that we try to get to the detail and the truth, if you will, of the matter. In this one, the issue is public services. My first point is one that has been discussed before, and I will discuss it again briefly: this is not a massive investment in our public services, relatively speaking. It does not even catch up with the past decade of austerity, and I will talk about that in a bit more detail. The other thing, though, is that spending is not being funnelled entirely into the public sector. Increasingly, it is being funnelled into the private sector, and from there it is going offshore and elsewhere, and I want to look into that as well, because I am suspicious about this Government’s new-found devotion to investment in public spending. I think there is something behind it that we need to look into.

The overall picture is that this is not a reversal of the deep cuts of the past decade. The Resolution Foundation has said that

“only one-third of the cuts to real day-to-day spending per-capita in unprotected departments since 2009-10 will have been reversed by the middle of the decade.”

Let us take for example the NHS, which this Government have made a great song and dance about. The British Medical Association has said that the previously announced £10 billion is not fully adequate to deal with the still-growing backlog of care. The Health Foundation has said that £17 billion is needed to clear the backlog. What do we get? Ten billion. That is a shortfall of £7 billion. We have the sheer brass neck of the Government telling the people of this country, “Look what we are doing. Look what we are spending”, but in relative spending terms, they are taking away from the public realm. We on the Opposition Benches know that, but I am not sure whether some of the Government Members understand that or believe or know what this Government have actually done.

Let us look at the NHS, because one thing I want to talk about is where the money is going. We know that the Health and Care Bill will increasingly privatise decision making on where NHS resources go. Increasingly, if corporations and big business are deciding where the tens of billions of pounds are going, you can bet your bottom dollar they will be going to the corporations, the private sector and shareholders and not being reinvested in public services. There is an issue here, which is democracy within our public services.

Let us take social care, for example. Some 83% of care home beds are owned by the private sector. If money was being reinvested into care beds and paying staff decent wages, I could understand why that was happening, but it is not. We know what is happening to vast amounts of money, which is going from the public purse into these so-called public services that are being run by vulture capitalism. The money is being sucked out and going to shareholders and offshore. That is where the money is increasingly going, and that is why this Government are so keen to spend billions of pounds handing out money to their friends who then recycle it and invest in the Conservative party. That is what is happening.

Let us look at the energy system, which is critical given what is going on up in Glasgow at the moment. Analysis by Common Wealth on the diversion of wealth from public to private has shown that, in the past five years, just under £10 billion in dividends has been paid to shareholders in the big six. That is six times larger than their tax payments of £1.52 billion. It found that

“the average firm within the Big Six has, over the past ten years, awarded their highest paid director almost fifty times the pay of the average worker in the company, and forty-five times the average income in the past five years.”

No wonder those on the Government Benches are so keen, after 10 years of austerity, to start pumping money to their friends in the big six and beyond.

Let us have a look at the Environment Agency. We know that it has said that there were 400,000 raw sewage discharges into coastal waters and rivers in England last year from private water companies. That is a tidal wave of turds that has splashed across this country on this Government’s watch. Professor David Hall from Greenwich University has said:

“Since privatisation companies have given out almost half as much for shareholders as they spent on upgrading and maintaining water and sewerage systems…£57 billion compared to £132 billion.”

This Government have the brass neck to tell this country that we cannot expect the privatised water companies to invest in a Victorian sewage system because they cannot afford it, but they can afford to give £60 billion of public money to their shareholders. Those on the Government Benches know that. No other country allows private companies to own and run regional water and sanitation systems. That is a fact.

While the Government talk about spending more on public services—we know that relatively speaking they have not, but when they do spend more, increasingly they are not public services as we on the Opposition Benches would recognise them, but public services run by and for private corporations that siphon off vast amounts of public wealth into their own bank accounts and coffers. I will conclude by saying that the answer is quite simple. When we on the Opposition Benches talk about public services, we are talking about universal basic services that are democratically controlled and owned and transparent and accountable to the people of this country who pay for them. That is the difference.