Amendment of the Law

Elizabeth Truss Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2011 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

Is not it the case that in 1997 Labour cancelled the road-building programme, which would have been an investment in infrastructure?

[Ed Balls]

If I remember rightly, our mistake was not to reverse the cancellation of the road-building programme that we inherited from the previous Government. We inherited an environment Department that did not want to build roads and a transport Department that had given up asking for transport investment. When we came into government it took time to build schools, because in the previous 18 years so few new schools had been built that local authorities had lost the capacity and the ability to build them. That is the reality.