Emma Hardy
Main Page: Emma Hardy (Labour - Kingston upon Hull West and Haltemprice)Department Debates - View all Emma Hardy's debates with the Department for Education
(3 years, 1 month ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Nadhim Zahawi
Respectfully, it is quite the opposite. I will get to that point later. Schools will be £1,500 better off per pupil than in 2019-20—not even 2010— but we will return to that subject in a moment or two.
I was getting to the point about those who are more vulnerable. For those who are most vulnerable, levelling up means that extra support will always be there for them. The covid virus has put enormous pressure on all our public services, and I know the whole House will want to join me in again thanking our magnificent public heroes—our nurses and doctors, our teachers and nursery workers, our care home staff and our delivery workers—for how they have helped us all to weather the pandemic storm.
The national health service has been the frontline of this pandemic and we must build up its resources after an unprecedented 18 months. We are committing £5.9 billion to tackle the NHS backlog of non-emergency tests and procedures, which will include £2.3 billion for ensuring that there are at least 100 community diagnostic centres where people can get health checks, scans and tests closer to their homes.
Digital technology is transforming every aspect of our lives, so the package includes £2.1 billion over the next three years to support its use in hospitals and other care organisations to improve efficiency, freeing up valuable NHS staff time and ensuring the best care for patients, wherever they are. There will also be £1.5 billion from that package over the next three years for new surgical hubs, increased bed capacity and equipment to help elective services to recover, including surgeries and other medical procedures.
We have promised an overhaul of our adult social care system, improving social care outcomes through an affordable, high-quality and sustainable system. We are therefore allocating £3.6 billion for local government to reform adult social care provision, including capping personal care costs at £86,000.
Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)
I thank the Secretary of State for giving way; he is always very generous. I draw his attention to the letter from the East Riding of Yorkshire Council, a Conservative-led authority, to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, stating that,
“the council has 302 assessed individuals requiring 4,114 hours of home care per week that we are currently unable to provide.”
The letter was dated in October. It identifies extra money that the Government have given, but says the council still does not have the funding needed to care for the people who need help in the East Riding.
Nadhim Zahawi
I am grateful to the hon. Lady, and I am sure the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care will take a careful look at her letter and respond in good time.
Nevertheless, it is this Government who have grasped the nettle of adult social care and will deliver on capping personal care costs, which can be so debilitating, at £86,000. While £1.7 billion will improve the wider social care system, including the East Riding of Yorkshire, as announced in September, at least £500 million of that will go towards improving qualifications, skills and wellbeing across the social care workforce.
Nadhim Zahawi
There is no greater champion of this agenda than my right hon. Friend, the Chairman of the Select Committee on Education. “Skills, skills, skills” runs through his veins, and I thank him for that point. I absolutely agree with him on the uplift in the investment that we are making.
I would like to take a moment to tell the House all about the visit I made to Barnsley College just a week or so ago. The college was the first in South Yorkshire to roll out T-levels. While I was there, I met several of its students, including one whose name is Greg. Honestly, I have rarely met a more inspiring individual. He told me that with his T-level—I will quote him word for word:
“I’m looking at unis now and thinking, ‘Which one am I picking?’ not ‘Which one of them is picking me?’”
Greg is living proof of the transformative effect our skills programme is having.
The same is true for apprentices. Apprenticeships funding will increase by £170 million to £2.7 billion, alongside other improvements to support more small businesses to hire new apprentices.
Nadhim Zahawi
I want to make sure that others get a chance to participate in the debate, so I will make some headway. I hope that the hon. Lady will forgive me; I beg her indulgence.
These investments are putting employers at the heart of our skills economy so that education and training respond to local business needs. In this way, we will not only build one of the best technical education systems in the world, but drive local prosperity and levelling up.
Of course, we know that skills training is not just for the young. As technologies change and develop and businesses adapt, so people will find that they will need to reskill or retrain throughout their lives. Globalisation and automation are changing the modern workplace. Jobs and industries that are flourishing now might not be in five or 10 years. Our skills economy must be sufficiently agile to flex not just for today but for tomorrow and long into the future.
With our “Skills for Jobs” White Paper, we are committed to boosting the job prospects of adults across the country by making sure that they can get the training they need to adapt to a changing workforce. A total investment of over £550 million will make sure that adults at any age can retrain or upskill, and that is part of our national skills fund commitment. We will be investing more in boot camps, which offer free flexible courses of up to 16 weeks, giving people the opportunity to build up specific skills with a clear route to a job at the end. We are also investing more to help adults in England take advantage of our free courses for jobs offer. There are now more than 400 courses to help more adults gain the skills they need to boost their career prospects. There will be opportunities for adults across the whole of the UK to develop their numeracy skills through the multiply programme the Chancellor announced, funded by another £560 million through the UK shared prosperity fund. That means that wherever people live and whatever stage they are at in life, they will be able to access training and education that gives them the skills employers want and which can lead to good jobs and career progression.
Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)
It is a great pleasure to follow the Secretary of State in today’s debate. Our public services keep the nation going. In the last 18 months, we have relied on them more than ever: on nurses, doctors, NHS and care staff, who have looked after us in the most difficult conditions; on police and the emergency services; on transport staff; and, of course, on teachers, lecturers, school and college leaders, early years, childcare and education support staff, who have kept children safe and learning. It is because of their dedication and the importance of the services that they provide that we needed a serious plan in this Budget to rebuild the services that the Government have cut to the bone in the last 10 years, and a plan to remake Britain. Instead, we got a high-tax, low-growth Budget that hits working people with a £3,000 hike in their tax bills; a Budget that did nothing to reduce living costs, tackle soaring energy bills or support working families this winter; and a Budget that failed to address the deep-rooted pressures on the public services on which we all rely.
Over the 74 years of its existence, the NHS has been a source of huge pride to this country. However, under the Conservative party, life expectancy among the poorest has fallen and health inequalities have widened, so measures to tackle that state of affairs were very much needed. Instead, we got the Chancellor pretending that a new wing or new unit somehow counts as a new hospital. We got a sticking plaster for social care, with local authorities having to levy their residents to pay for it. Incredibly, after the 18 months we have all been through, the Government failed to prioritise public health, which has suffered a 24% cut in real terms since 2015-16.
Emma Hardy
In the Treasury Committee yesterday, we heard evidence from the Office for Budget Responsibility, which predicts that 95% of councils will raise their precept to the maximum to cover social care—another thing that will have an impact on the cost of living. The letter that I quoted from earlier, which was written to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care not by me, but by the leader of Conservative-led East Riding of Yorkshire Council, says that adult social care is in crisis.
Kate Green
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The levy to fund social care is one more tax that will hit hard-pressed families in the spring and will do nothing about the deep-seated need to address the social care crisis and the increasing pressure from an ageing demographic—it will not even touch the sides.
Kate Green
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Again and again, I have met people who have described their learning journey from BTECs to university and an excellent career. Of course we want T-levels to succeed, but there is no reason to remove other qualifications that provide a different route that is more appropriate for some young people. Under Labour, every young person will receive education that is appropriate to them, whether that is an apprenticeship, technical education or university, and will leave it ready for work and life.
Kate Green
If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I will make some progress.
OECD data show that the UK has some of the world’s highest childcare costs—the cost of nursery provision for a one-year-old increased four times faster than wages between 2008 and 2016—but despite the high costs for parents, many early years providers are struggling to stay afloat. This year alone, nearly 3,000 childcare and early years providers have closed their doors. This Budget could have been an opportunity to put provision on a sustainable footing, reduce costs to parents and invest in quality, making a real difference to millions of families, but the announcements that we got were inadequate.
Don’t get me wrong: any investment in families with young children and in support for new parents is welcome, but the family hubs project is a pale imitation of what the Conservatives inherited in 2010. [Interruption.] “Nonsense,” says the Minister, but let me tell him that when Labour left office, there were 3,500 Sure Start centres delivering support to more than 2.9 million children in every local authority in the country. Since then, 1,000 children’s centres have closed. A moment ago, I think the Secretary of State was promising new family hubs in only half of local authorities. Can he tell me how many family hubs in total will be created as a result of the spending announcements?
By the 2021 summer term, children had missed an average of 115 days of schooling, and on 21 October, just before the half-term break, 248,000 children were still out of school as a result of covid, yet the Government’s response falls well below the scale of ambition needed for children’s educational recovery. The extra £1.8 billion announced by the Chancellor last week brings the Government’s recovery plans up to a total of £5 billion—far short of the £15 billion that their own expert adviser said would be needed to ensure that children make a full recovery from the pandemic.
Labour, by contrast, remains committed to our £15 billion children’s recovery plan. Whereas the Government will provide tutoring to just one in 16 pupils this year, Labour’s plan would resource schools to deliver tutoring to all who need it. We would deliver universal catch-up breakfast clubs and extend the school day for additional activities—I noted that the Secretary of State seemed to be in favour of that at Education questions yesterday, but he got nothing from the Chancellor. We would invest in training world-class teachers and teaching assistants and in supporting the early years sector, schools and colleges with an education recovery premium. We would prioritise young people’s mental health, giving every school access to a professional mental health counsellor.
Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)
I strongly welcome this Budget. We should acknowledge that over the past 18 months, this country has faced a national emergency comparable only to the outbreak of the second world war. We have already spent £407 billion supporting schools, businesses and industries in my constituency and across the country to tackle the impacts of the covid-19 pandemic, without which we would have had destitution on the streets. I recognise the economic and financial challenges that the Government are facing. We have a national debt of over £2.2 trillion, equivalent to around 100% of our gross domestic product. That is why the Government are doing everything possible to square the circle in terms of spending on public services and dealing with the deficit and debt. It is not an easy task.
My two passions in politics have always been championing education and skills, and cutting the cost of living. I support this Budget because despite the circumstances I have just set out, the Chancellor has tried to address both. This is a true worker’s Budget in many ways, because there is a strong desire across the country to improve the cost of living and for low taxation. I previously supported the temporary £20 uplift to universal credit payments, but I genuinely think that the Chancellor’s decision to decrease the universal credit taper rate and uplift the work allowance is a better solution in the long run, because it gets people out of the poverty trap and incentivises more people into work. That will both boost people’s income and earnings and help reduce unemployment as we move into a high-productivity and skilled economy.
In addition, we have the £500 million invested in families and early years intervention, helping those who are struggling the most. We have the record 6.6% rise in the national living wage, which I campaigned hard for the Cameron Government to introduce, to £9.50. We have the fuel duty freeze—something I have campaigned for, probably to the annoyance of the Treasury—continuing for the twelfth year in a row, saving motorists £15 every time they fill up. That is what makes a difference to those who are just about managing. I hope that the Government will do much more to cut the cost of living. We should cut taxes for lower earners as soon as economic conditions allow and we should look at ways to further reduce energy bills. Cutting the cost of living must be the Government’s central mission.
On education, the Budget’s focus on skills, schools and families, as described by the Secretary of State for Education in his opening remarks, should be welcomed. Education and skills are the most important rung on the ladder of opportunity. They are the golden thread that tie together all our investments and our futures.
The outbreak of coronavirus was nothing short of a national disaster for our children. The four horsemen of the education apocalypse came galloping towards young people to create a widening attainment gap, worsening mental health issues, an ever-increasing number of safeguarding hazards, and a challenge to their skills development and life chances. We should never again fully close the schools in the way that we did.
The Budget showed a real recognition from the Chancellor and the Education Secretary that those challenges can be overcome through family hubs, the catch-up and education recovery funding, and the rocket-boosting of skills. Not much has been said today about the extra £2.6 billion of funding to strengthen the provision for children with special educational needs, but it is important and will be welcomed by parents across the country.
The lifetime skills guarantee announced last year created the blueprint for the skills funding package, which provides an extra £3 billion for T-levels and adult skills, among other things. That is a 42% increase in skills funding in cash terms, which will put vocational and technical education on a par with traditional academic learning and give financial teeth to the skills agenda.
Robert Halfon
I am always honoured to give way to—not to ruin her career—one of my favourite Labour Members.
Emma Hardy
Does the right hon. Gentleman, who I call my friend, agree that although the investment in T-levels is great, a transition pathway is needed if we are going to phase out BTECs and introduce T-levels?
Robert Halfon
I absolutely believe that BTECs should not go until T-levels have fully come on board. As a hard-working former member of the Education Committee, the hon. Lady will be pleased to know that I hope to question the Secretary of State about that subject tomorrow morning when he appears before the Committee.
As I have mentioned, the £2.6 billion of funding for children with special educational needs is extraordinary, but we need the urgent publication of the special educational needs review to move forward at light speed. Although lots has been done to provide the key components of a long-term plan for education, we are not there yet. The cogs have started to turn, but the machine is not yet as well oiled as it might be. We need a long-term plan for education and a secure funding settlement, just as the NHS and the Ministry of Defence have long-term plans and a secure funding settlement and a strategic review respectively.
As Members on both sides of the House know, I have long advocated the extension of the school day. The Education Endowment Foundation says that pupils can make two months’ additional progress per year by extending the school day, or three months for disadvantaged pupils. Some 39% of academies founded pre-2010 have lengthened their school day, as I have seen done successfully by the NET Academies Trust in my constituency. The Department for Education and the Treasury should fund pilot projects, perhaps in some of the most disadvantaged areas of the country, to evaluate what the impact could be alongside the catch-up programme.
To conclude, I heartily welcome the Budget targeted towards skills, schools and families. I have been campaigning for more skills funding for a long time so I welcome what the Chancellor has done. It has been a difficult year and a half for all Members and for the constituencies we serve, but the steps outlined in the Budget will go a long way to support our nation’s recovery as we try to level up and build back better.
Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)
I welcome the opportunity to speak in the debate and endorse everything said by my right hon. Friend the Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) about schools and education. On those issues, he is always bang-on. Since the Budget, I have had positive conversations in particular on the transition between BTECs and T-levels that I hope will be reflected by the Secretary of State’s comments tomorrow. There are many opportunities there.
I welcome the many positive announcements in the Budget, which has been largely well received by residents. It set a good and clear direction to help take the country forward post covid. In particular, I welcome the business support measures, business rates cuts, changes to alcohol duties, the freeze on fuel duty and other measures that will impact on the cost of living and support businesses to grow and innovate. At some stage, we will have to reform business rates fundamentally. The measures announced in the Budget are positive and will support businesses—high street businesses in particular—but business rates are not fit for purpose. I had positive conversations last week on that with the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, and I understand that a review is to take place. I look forward to seeing that in due course.
I also welcome the personal support for the lowest paid, with a £1,000 pay rise and a tax cut for working people on universal credit. The average wage packet in Mansfield is way below the national average, and thousands of people will benefit from those changes. I am grateful for those announcements.
I welcome the significant capital commitments on transport and infrastructure, although I am slightly concerned that it seems that only areas with combined authorities and devolution deals are eligible to get the best of that support. We have some positive announcements for Nottinghamshire: Mansfield will submit a bid for the next round of the levelling-up fund, as will Nottinghamshire County Council, and we look forward to positive news, hopefully. There was a huge multibillion pound investment in devolved mayoral authorities. However, the east midlands does not have that, so the area that historically has had the lowest level of investment misses out.
Do not get me wrong—I am not moaning. I think that passing powers down to local level and giving capital funds to accountable local leaders is a good thing. If I do have a moan, it is that we do not have one, and we want one in Nottinghamshire. We have a plan for that, and I want the Government to get on and give Nottinghamshire a county deal so that we too can benefit from such support. I remind Ministers of the fantastic levelling-up package that the east midlands offers with our freeport, our development corporation and our huge plans around Toton supported by the integrated rail plan. Altogether, that is more than 100,000 jobs and £5 billion in gross value added. The plan exists and is all on track, and a devolution deal for Nottingham—which, by the way, is a bigger geography than the Tees Valley Combined Authority or the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority—would give us huge economic clout. It is a chance to invest for us, to get on a par with other parts of the country. We want a deal, we have the unanimous support of local leaders who have all made significant resource commitments for that, and we have a plan to deliver better public services. I will keep banging on about it until we get one—I am sure that Ministers will indulge me.
I turn to public services, which are the theme of the debate. There was positive news in the Budget, with £4.8 billion in grant funding to local authorities both very welcome and perhaps more generous than many had expected. That will help us to tackle things such as the cost of the minimum wage rise for care staff, which runs into the millions. I also welcome the commitment to new family hubs and the Start4Life programme that will benefit children and families who really need it.
I said in an intervention that certainty for the supporting families programme and investment in the development of early years staff is fantastic. In particular, early years staff development has been a problem for a long time, so the more we can do to support that sector, the better. We must continue the commitment to proactive and preventive services. In truth, children’s services, not social care, are causing every upper tier council leader in the land the biggest headache on budget setting. There are many challenges in social care, but, if I had loads of money, I could not spend it because I cannot recruit the staff. The challenges there are deep and long term.
Emma Hardy
The problems with recruiting were raised by East Riding of Yorkshire Council, and one reason why it is asking the Government for more money is that it wants to be able to offer higher wages to try to compete with organisations such as Amazon, which attract workers who would previously have worked in care.
Ben Bradley
I thank the hon. Member for that intervention, which pre-empts something I will come to. In effect, I will make the same point later in my speech. The truth is that next year we will underspend on social care, because we cannot recruit the staff to pay them, even if we had the money. In children’s services, demand is growing exponentially. The complexities and costs are becoming increasingly difficult. There are also significant additional needs for school places for children coming from Hong Kong, and significant care issues for asylum-seeking children. The children’s budget of every council in the land is overspent.
I therefore welcome measures focused on early intervention. I would love to talk to Ministers about supporting the transition towards a set of more preventive services. I welcome the announcement in the Budget, but we must continue the trend of having a better attitude to risk management and how we support families in their homes before we get to that acute stage. That change of approach and culture will save money in the end, but it will require more up-front resource.
The Government could support Nottinghamshire and the whole country by letting us pilot new proposals and ideas in the space through a county deal. We have thoughts about how we might like to do that, working with organisations such as the National Youth Agency, the charitable sector and our great Nottinghamshire universities to change the game and learn some lessons. I would welcome conversations with Ministers about that.
On social care, and the point made by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy), councils need teeth to get the money. More funding is welcome, but at the minute that funding is going to the NHS, whose backlog is in large parts due to the limits of social care. We cannot get people out of hospital and into appropriate homes or care packages, and we cannot offer sufficient preventive interventions. People end up in hospital, which is not the best place for them, because social care does not have the resources to provide emergency support or to fetch Mrs Miggins and put in place a care plan for her; instead, she ends up going off in an ambulance.
The Government could help tackle the NHS backlog by backing social care. As it stands, it appears that we must go with our begging bowl to the integrated care system to ask for funding from the national insurance rise for services such as supporting hospital discharge or response teams that can offer care in the home rather than an emergency response. The funding is aimed at the NHS backlog and, although it needs to fund those social care interventions to be successful, we seem to be at the NHS’s mercy on whether it gives us that funding. I hope that Ministers will tackle that imbalance in the White Paper. It is hugely important to the transition and new approach to social care that we get that right, because the two are not separate services; they interlink closely.
We will meet a cliff edge in a few weeks, when the requirement for care staff to be vaccinated begins. I have raised that issue a few times. In Nottinghamshire alone, 1,000 staff or more could be no longer eligible to work in a sector that already has a 12% vacancy rate. Is it riskier to have an unvaccinated care worker or not to have a care worker? We may face that challenge. I know that there are financial mitigations to try to help, but, as I have said, we cannot recruit. We do not set the wages—largely, services are commissioned from private providers—and people can get £1.50 an hour more at Amazon than working in the care sector. I have said to Ministers before that we need to consider carefully whether it is right in effect to force a lot of people out of a profession that is already struggling with recruitment and with getting the right staff in the right places.
That said, there are many fantastic interventions in the Budget. I touched on many of them. However, those challenges will not go away. I therefore look forward to conversations about them with Ministers across various Departments in due course. There are real positives to take, with the Government continuing to support jobs and individuals. The OBR tells us that the interventions throughout the pandemic made a huge impact on protecting people and keeping them in work over the last 18 months. The plan for jobs has been incredibly successful so far, and I trust that that will continue. I welcome the many measures in the Budget that will impact positively on my constituents and look forward in due course to discussing in more detail with Ministers some of the challenges that I raised.
Emma Hardy (Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Kilmarnock and Loudoun (Alan Brown). I agree with the point that he made about the shared prosperity fund and the need for it to be announced quickly so that we can get the funding that we need in all areas.
I do not want to be too negative, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I was a little disappointed when, in the Treasury Committee, I raised concerns about debt advice directly with the Chancellor and he did not seem to be fully aware of the situation, so I hope that, today, those on the Front Bench will take this point really seriously.
Hull has been named one of the debt capitals of the UK. We have double the average number of people unable to service their debt levels. At the moment, a face-to-face service is provided by the Money and Pensions Service. I am aware that that does not operate directly through the Treasury, but I am also aware that policy decisions relating to debt are informed by the Treasury. What I am asking for is an assurance that that face-to-face advice service remains, because what the service is proposing is to move towards regional call centres where people can access debt advice remotely. I am sure that everybody here, including, hopefully, Conservative Members, will acknowledge that if a person is in a desperate situation—they are saddled with debt, have perhaps not been opening their bills, and are incredibly worried about the situation that they face—the idea that they can go through all the issues on the telephone with someone is simply unrealistic. That is ignoring the fact that some people might have autism or learning disabilities or be in an extremely distressed state. I do hope the Treasury will take that point really seriously and speak to the Money and Pensions Service.
Let me turn now to the Budget. I had six clear asks of the Budget to provide what I believe was needed by the people of Hull West and Hessle. One was on fuel poverty. I support the Labour party’s call for the ending of VAT on domestic fuel as one way to try to alleviate the problems. This really lovely lady told me that she was worried about the issue. She is a pensioner and reliant on her pension. She likes to be warm, as elderly people often do—when people get older they like to keep their homes nice and warm. She is at home all day, so is extremely concerned about the rise in fuel costs, telling me that her bills have gone up by more than 40%. This is an area that needs a lot more Government action, because the problem will not go away; it will continue. I hope the Government will put party politics to one side and review a sensible proposal from the Labour party to look at cutting VAT on domestic fuel.
I raised the issue of adult social care in interventions on the Secretary of State and on my own shadow Front Bencher. I also raised it at the Treasury Committee. The issue has nothing to do with the type of council in control, or the political party that represents it. My constituency is in the East Riding, and it is also in Hull. Hull is urban and a Labour authority. East Riding is rural and a Conservative authority. Both councils have come to me and said that, as the local MP, could I do everything possible to lobby the Government for support for adult social care. In fact, the Conservative-run East Riding of Yorkshire Council has just passed a motion in its council chamber on this matter.
This should not be a political issue. The situation is a crisis. I said in an intervention on the Minister that East Riding council is unable to provide the amount of care hours that constituents need. It has admitted that in a letter and has been quite open and honest with me, saying that it simply cannot provide the service. Its solution is to tell families that they will either have to take care of the person in need themselves or that person will have to go into residential care. That is not a choice that we want people to have to make, so the council has asked me to lobby the Government for increased funding for adult social care, because it says that it is unable to compete with companies such as Amazon, which is offering £11 an hour, because all that it is able to offer is the minimum wage. It told me that it is facing budget pressures of £1.4 million with the national minimum wage increase that the Government have already announced. Of course I support the national minimum wage increase—in fact, I believe that it should be more, as I think all Labour Members do—but we have to acknowledge that the cost has to come from somewhere, and if it is coming from the adult social care budget, it is not going on providing the hours that are needed. The letter has been sent to the Health Secretary. I hope that he reads it, acknowledges it and sends us a reply.
Simon Hoare (North Dorset) (Con)
My own council in Dorset tells a similar story. Does the hon. Lady agree that it would be helpful if when we were talking about adult social care, particularly in the media, we did not just concentrate on those who are older, but remember the complete age range of people who require daily support from our local government? I agree with her entirely that the local government family, which is hardest hit in hard times, really should be the beneficiary of extra cash as the purse strings loosen.
Emma Hardy
I absolutely agree; the hon. Gentleman is completely right. We do often forget all those people with learning difficulties and adults of all ages requiring support. He is correct to draw attention to that point.
The situation really is one of crisis. Yesterday I was talking to the OBR—again, in the Treasury Committee—and it said that it believed that 95% of councils are going to raise their precept to the maximum amount. That is another tax increase that is not being mentioned by the Government and we are not talking about. It is another impact on the cost of living, and councils are having to do that because they simply cannot afford to cover social care as it is.
I want briefly to mention universal credit. Even with the changes to the taper and the other changes that the Government have introduced, a lone parent who is working part-time on the minimum wage still loses £361. All the time throughout this Budget, it seems that people on lower pay are paying more in taxes. That just does not feel right.
I often hear Government Members say, “Well, where would you find the money? What are you going to do with it?” It always comes down to choices; in politics, everything is about choices. We have a certain amount of finance and then we make a choice. My personal priority would be not to give more money to whisky price cuts and tax cuts than I would give to children needing educational catch-up. That is just a principle that I have: children before whisky—call me radical! I would also not spend £5 billion sending a rocket up into space funded by the British Government, when we have lots of children here on earth who might require that money a little bit more. Again, it comes down to choices: rockets and whisky, or kids.
We also need to look more seriously at business rates. Interestingly, Government Members talked about a whole radical change to business rates, which I support. This is a disappointing Budget, filled with many issues that need resolving. I hope that the Government will finally do something about them.
Bridget Phillipson
I will make a little progress, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will happily work with the hon. Gentleman. I know that he tries to work hard for his constituents.
Emma Hardy
While we are on the subject of railways, is my hon. Friend as frustrated as I am that we have yet to see the integrated rail plan and that there have been no announcements regarding Northern Powerhouse Rail? It was not meant to go from Manchester to Leeds; we were originally promised that it would be from Hull all the way over to Liverpool? I hope that she will put as much pressure on the Government as I will to get that delivered.
Bridget Phillipson
Absolutely; 60 times we have had announcements on the plan, but not a single spade in the ground. I will now make a little more progress.
The theme today is public services. I put on record again our immense gratitude to all those who have been keeping our public services going during the most challenging times over the last 18 months. There are really too many public sector workers to mention, but their contribution should be noted. The Government claim that they will give public sector workers belated pay rises, but cannot confirm whether they will be real- terms pay rises. Only under the Tories could a so-called pay rise mean that people are actually less well off.
Working people are being expected to pay so much more, but what for exactly? There are 5.7 million people on waiting lists for operations, GP appointments are harder than ever to come by and there are 100,000 vacancies in our NHS. We see falling apprenticeship starts, supersized classrooms for our children, antisocial behaviour at its highest level for years, rape convictions at record low levels, violent criminals walking free, fewer police officers and less safe communities. However, there was a vanity yacht for the Prime Minister, when he could have tackled antisocial behaviour instead. Tory Ministers have finally discovered, 11 years late, that the early years matter—who knew? But there is no apology from the Chancellor for closing more than 1,000 children’s centres since 2010. What price the unrealised potential and limited life opportunities over that lost decade?
This is a Budget with no plan for the cost-of-living crisis, no plan for fairer taxes and no plan for growth. The clocks went back an hour at the weekend, but in tax terms this Budget wound the clock back all the way to the 1950s, when taxes were last this high. It is the Conservatives’ record of low growth that has driven them to higher taxes, just as their failure to plan ahead has led to higher inflation and higher bills.
Labour would tax fairly, spend wisely and get the economy firing on all cylinders. We would cut VAT on heating bills and help to insulate homes. We would back our world-leading industries, and buy, make and sell more here in Britain. We would scrap business rates and replace them with a much fairer system that is fit for the modern world. We would secure our transition to net zero with well paid, highly skilled jobs in every corner of our country. We would not clobber working people and British businesses while online giants get away without paying their fair share. We need a Budget to ease the urgent pressure on families and businesses—a Budget to seize new opportunities and to unleash our country’s potential. We have a proud history but I believe that our best days are ahead of us. The Chancellor has made the wrong choices throughout this Budget; the Conservatives have made the wrong choices throughout the past decade. Our country deserves better.
The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (Mr Simon Clarke)
It is a privilege to bring the past four days of Budget debate to a close. Over that time we have heard dozens of excellent speeches from across the House. I echo what the shadow Chief Secretary said in thanking all those who contributed. I express my deep gratitude to the civil service and the wider Treasury team, who have devoted long hours to preparing this Budget, working closely over the course of the spending review with all other Government Departments. I am immensely grateful for their hard work.
I also pay tribute to the Chancellor for his third Budget in 19 of the most challenging months in living memory. Winston Churchill once told this House:
“The first Budget of a Chancellor is often well received, but the third Budget is the most critical of all, because it is the heir of previous decisions”.—[Official Report, 22 September 1943; Vol. 392, c. 212.]
Well, this third Budget is a vindication. As Members will recall, over his first two Budgets, the Chancellor developed our plan to protect jobs and livelihoods and to safeguard the economy from coronavirus. In the words of the Office for Budget Responsibility, that plan has proven “remarkably successful”. The OBR’s forecasts show that our economy returned to its pre-pandemic size around the turn of the year, several months earlier than previously expected. Wages are rising, growing in real terms by 3.4% compared with February 2020. More people are in work and literally millions fewer people than anticipated last July are unemployed. Our public finances are under control and debt is under control. To echo the Chancellor: growth up, jobs up, debt down.
Just because disaster has been averted does not mean that we should take that for granted. It is the result of conscious policy decisions that have steered our nation to a safer place. Now is the time to carry this momentum through into building the economy this Government were elected to deliver, with a future of higher wages, higher skills and rising productivity, no longer based on Labour’s and the SNP’s model of low-skilled migrant European labour, but based on training and equipping our own people to succeed; and a future where our businesses flourish and drive growth and that growth is shared more evenly across the United Kingdom. We will have a greener economy. Multiple Opposition speakers, such as the hon. Member for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome) and the right hon. Member for Walsall South (Valerie Vaz), seemed to forget the £30 billion net zero strategy announced just a fortnight ago. It will be a future where our citizens benefit from world-class public services at every stage of their lives.
Emma Hardy
I am aware that the Minister is very familiar with the area I represent, and indeed the local council, but on the issue of labour shortages I raised in the debate, and have raised in earlier proceedings, we have a shortage of adult social care workers in the East Riding of Yorkshire—a shortage so great that people cannot access all the care that they need. When he talks about labour shortages, is he going to address the shortages we have in that sector?
Mr Clarke
I thank the hon. Lady; hers was one of the more thoughtful speeches in this debate. We have committed £162.5 million as part of our winter plan to help fund the adult social care workforce. That money is exactly designed to make sure that we can attract people into this most pivotal of sectors. That comes on top of the £5.4 billion across the spending review that we have committed, thanks to the new health and social care levy, and the record funding for local government that was announced in the SR. I am always happy to work with her on this, but there is more money for this sector.