Office for Budget Responsibility (Manifesto Audits)

Debate between Ed Balls and Mark Field

Wednesday 25th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Ed Balls]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. If we, as a House, decide to proceed in a cross-party way today, and in the coming days, this reform can be agreed over the summer, the legislation to back it can be put in place, and we can have independent audits of manifestos at the next election. It is not a matter of timetabling, because the head of the OBR says that it can be done: it is only an issue of political will. If, in the end, the Chancellor—who has not turned up—does not want to do it, it is not going to happen. It is not going to happen not because the OBR will not do it, because we will not do it, or because it cannot be done, but because Government Front Benchers do not want it to happen.

[Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

I have some sympathy with what the shadow Chancellor is trying to achieve. While he is right that the OBR should be beyond partisan politics, it is the case that it has not been beyond reproach in relation to its predictions and continues to be well out of line, given what we expected our deficit to have come down to. Does he recognise that this process is not going to draw a line under any disputes over matters to do with economic programmes? Ultimately, it will be a judgment by the voters rather than the OBR, and this process should not be allowed to take it out of their hands come election time.

[Ed Balls]

Of course, none of us is beyond reproach, including the OBR and including the Chancellor. The OBR has had a few rather sharp things to say about some of the Chancellor’s practices over the past few months as regards fiscal decision making. In the end, of course the voters have to decide; they have to look at the manifestos and make their judgment. In our view, if an independent body—the OBR—scrutinises the costings of individual proposals to check that they have been done properly, that can only be to the benefit of the public debate. Ultimately, it does not take away the voters’ choice, but why would we choose to have them misinformed or uninformed when we could have them properly informed? That is the choice before the House.

Finance (No. 4) Bill

Debate between Ed Balls and Mark Field

Monday 16th April 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mark Field]

The important thing that the hon. Lady needs to recognise is that there is a distinction, as I said in the early part of my speech, between the rhetoric and the reality of austerity. We have not really had much in the way of fiscal tightening in this country. We are still borrowing and living miles beyond our means—this is a lesson, I am afraid, for the entire political class—and we will face a huge problem. We continue to pass that burden on to our children and grandchildren, not in any meaningful way for investment, but for today’s consumption, which is not sustainable.

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

I think I agree with hon. Gentleman on that point. As I understand it, he is saying that he agrees with the point made earlier in the year by—I believe—Standard & Poor’s, which said that austerity by itself does not work and can become self-defeating if it leads to higher unemployment, slower growth, and therefore to higher spending, fewer taxes, and therefore higher deficits. Is that his point?

Amendment of the Law

Debate between Ed Balls and Mark Field

Thursday 24th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Ed Balls]

I noticed that the Chancellor did not choose to intervene with the answer that I was hoping for, but there we are. The fact is, when we came into government in 1997, we made the Bank of England independent and he opposed it.

We had a period of sustained growth and rising employment. The Conservatives said that the national minimum wage would cost jobs, but employment went up. Under the Conservatives child poverty doubled; under Labour it came down.

We had the longest sustained period of investment in the NHS since the second world war, but there was a global financial recession, which affected countries around the world. Who dealt with that? The British people should be thankful that it was not the Chancellor and his friends, because opposing nationalisation of the Royal Bank of Scotland and Northern Rock would have been a catastrophe for the British economy.

[Mr Mark Field (Cities of London and Westminster) (Con)]

Although the right hon. Gentleman is right to say that there was global downturn, and he also rightly points out that there had been continued growth between 2000 and 2007, in each and every one of those years a deficit was being run up. That is our point—an unsustainable deficit was run up in the good times, before the global crisis began.

[Ed Balls]

I have studied the Chancellor’s new fiscal mandate. He says that he wants to get the national debt on a downward trend by the end of the Parliament. We had national debt on a downward trend in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001. Before the financial crisis hit, our national debt was lower than the debt we inherited from the Conservatives. [Interruption.] Hon. Members are barracking—but let me answer the hon. Gentleman, because at least he asked a serious question, unlike some of the nonsense we have heard from other hon. Members on the Government side of the House. The second part of the fiscal mandate is to get the budget, excluding investment—the current balance—back into balance by 2015. Yet that is the golden rule.

The golden rule is getting, over the cycle, the current budget, excluding investment, into balance. That never happened in the 1980s and the 1990s, but it happened for a sustained period under Labour. However, it is true that, throughout that period, we borrowed to invest. Of course we did. Our infrastructure—our schools and hospitals—had not been invested in for 20 or 30 years. Throughout the period before the financial crisis, national debt was below the level that we inherited from the previous Conservative Government.