Oral Answers to Questions

Ed Balls Excerpts

Tuesday 6th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

My right hon. Friend makes a powerful point. We must learn the lessons of what went wrong in the regulation of our banking system and ask deep questions about how, as an economy, we underwrite that system. That is why the Government asked John Vickers and his fellow commissioners to look at the structure of the banking system and at how we can ensure that Britain can be home to global banks but, at the same time, the British taxpayer can be protected should those banks fail. Of course, John Vickers will publish his final report next week and I am sure that there will be plenty of discussion about it.

[Ed Balls (Morley and Outwood) (Lab/Co-op)]

With the future jobs fund and education maintenance allowance abolished, Labour Members have been urging the Chancellor to repeat the bank bonus tax on top of the bank levy in order to get young people into work. The Chancellor claims that the economy is recovering, unemployment is falling and that such action is unnecessary, so will he tell the House how many more young people, compared with a year ago, are now not in education, employment or training?

[Mr Osborne]

The number of 16 and 17-year-old NEETs has actually come down, and more than 500,000 new jobs have been created in the private sector over the past year. The right hon. Gentleman talks about the bonus tax, and I will use not the advice I have been given by Treasury officials to respond, but the advice I have been given by the previous Chancellor of the Exchequer, someone we know he is very close to. The previous Chancellor said this of the bonus tax, and he after all is the man who introduced it:

“It will be a one-off thing because, frankly, the very people you are after here are very good at getting out of these things and... will find all sorts of imaginative ways of avoiding it”.

That is why he did not want it to be anything more than a one-off tax, and that is why we introduced a much more permanent and sustainable tax on the banks, which the right hon. Gentleman never introduced when he was City Minister. It is a permanent bank levy that raises more net every year than the one-off bonus tax did.

[Ed Balls]

Unemployment is rising and the stock market is plummeting—it is no surprise that the Chancellor does not want to answer the question about youth unemployment. Let me tell the House that the number of young people between 18 and 25 out of work and not in education, employment or training has gone up in the past year by 18%: 119,000 more young people are unemployed. Let me tell the Chancellor what my right hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Mr Darling) said on “Newsnight” last night:

“The government, by going so fast, is really strangling the economy…if you go too fast you stall”—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I think the shadow Chancellor will want to refer to taxation levels on the banking industry.

[Ed Balls]

The argument that I am making is that the Chancellor is ignoring the case for repeating the bank bonus tax for a second year, even though youth unemployment has gone up by 18%—119,000 more. Let me ask him a second—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I say to the shadow Chancellor that what we need now is a very brief question. We need to move on; there are a lot of questions to cover.

[Ed Balls]

The question that people will be asking is if the Chancellor will not change his mind on the bank bonus tax, on VAT and on the pace of deficit reduction, why is he now changing his mind on stalling bank reform? He said that we were all in it together. Why is there one rule for the banks and another rule for everyone else?

[Mr Osborne]

Now we can see why the former Chancellor has said that the Labour party had no credible economic policy. The shadow Chancellor had all summer to think of that question, and the best he came up with was that we were not regulating the banks. He was the City Minister when the City exploded. We have taken action better to regulate the banks. We set up the commission that will report next week. As for downgraded numbers, the fastest falling numbers around here are his economic credibility numbers.