Budget Resolutions

David Drew Excerpts

Monday 27th November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Dr David Drew (Stroud) (Lab/Co-op)]

Unlike my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton North (Alex Cunningham), this is my first Budget speech in seven years, so I shall enjoy myself in making it. In his great roman à thèse on the situation of Britain, “Sybil”, written in 1845, Disraeli referred to the two nations: the nation that was growing in prosperity—the bourgeoisie, the landowners and professional classes; and the wage slaves in the factories and those who eked a bare existence on the land. Unfortunately, if Disraeli were to come back today, he may see the similarities, rather than the differences. We are quite simply talking about two nations here.

In my short Budget speech, I wish to draw attention to a number of issues that highlight those two nations, the first of which is housing. Although the £44 billion is a welcome figure, we need to boost local authority housing—what we used to call “council housing”. The only reference to this in the Red Book, on page 63, states:

“The Budget will lift Housing Revenue Account borrowing caps for councils in areas of high affordability pressure, so they can build more council homes.”

That takes effect only in 2019-20, so we already have to wait a year, and we are talking about £1 billion. My simplistic calculation leads me to believe that that may allow us to build a few hundred homes, but we have a crisis in social renting and it needs crisis finance. We are not providing that.

Other areas are simply ignored in the Budget—for example, the care sector. Much of my local care sector is in crisis; there is not the money to provide any decent quality of care. Renewables are flatlining. If we are to go towards the carbon-free economy, we have to boost renewables, yet aside from a brief mention there is nothing about them in this Budget. Likewise, we are not trying to do anything other than offer placebos on education. Sadly, the national funding formula, which many of us who have supported the f40 campaign have long awaited, has not improved the funding of many of our schools. Indeed, things are worse for many of our schools because of the way in which the Government have, by a clever trick, now conflated the special educational needs budget into the base budget. That is a tragedy because it is our children who will be suffering.

I welcome the comments in the Budget on what we intend to do about plastics, but we need to go much further in tackling waste. We need to boost the way in which we deal with food recycling, recognising that there is an alternative to incineration, which seems to be how the Government Front Benchers see us dealing with waste. In a time of air quality problems, that is exactly the wrong direction to go in. I welcome what the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) said about the WASPI women. I had a short meeting with them on Saturday and it was one of the most moving meetings I have ever sat in, just because they feel that they have been robbed. To me, all those issues are clear dividing lines. We live in a country where we do not want those dividing lines. We need to bring it back together and I hope that a future Government will—

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. I call Sir Robert Syms.