Budget Resolutions

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd November 2017 Commons Chamber

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Wallasey (Ms Eagle), but her speech shows that the Labour party has learnt nothing about how to run a successful modern economy. The Chancellor referred in his speech to the Labour party increasing our national debt by £500 billion. The easiest thing in the world is to spend more and borrow more, which is precisely the situation the Labour party left us in back in 2010, which is why we have had to have austerity Budgets over the past few years.

Indeed, I recently went to a lunch and met a director of one of our major banks—[Interruption.] Opposition Members ought to listen to this. He said, “Our focus of attention has changed from Brexit. We will cope with whatever politicians throw at us with Brexit, but our focus of attention has changed to political risk: the risk of a Labour Government ruining the economy.”

In contrast, what we saw today was a prudent Budget from my right hon. Friend the Chancellor. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Wokingham (John Redwood) has said, it was a fiscal loosening Budget, but at the same time we have been able to stabilise our national debt and put more money into our public services, particularly the NHS and education, and into infrastructure, and we have been able to deal with some of the tax evasion. I serve on the Public Accounts Committee, so I was particularly pleased to see that its recommendations on VAT fraud have been taken up. I pay tribute to my hon. Friends the Members for Dover (Charlie Elphicke) and for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) for their hard work on that.

The recent Government White Paper on housing said that the UK needs to build 250,000 new houses a year. It certainly does, because if one asks the teachers or nurses in the Cotswolds where they live, nine times out of 10 they will say that they do not live in the Cotswolds, and that also applies in other areas of high house prices. Anything that can be done to stabilise the housing market and produce more housing for lower-paid people must be a good thing.

[Sir Desmond Swayne]

In my parliamentary division, the difficulty is that private builders will not address that proportion of the market where the need is greatest: the bottom and the mid-market. Equally, such is the increase in supply that is required to drive down the price, it is questionable as to whether it would be in the interests of independent builders to secure such a reduction in price. The greatest increase in the market was achieved through public sector building; does my hon. Friend see that as a possibility?

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

The need to build more houses is about providing houses for those who cannot afford to buy and get on the housing ladder. There are lots of ways to do that in the affordable housing sector, such as affordable rent-to-buy, staircasing and many other methods. That is what we need to pay attention to. I shall say something about the planning system in a moment.

The structure of house ownership has changed in the past 10 years, in which the number of under-45s who own their own homes has dropped by a million. That is something we need to address, so I find it extraordinary that Labour Members should be carping about the welcome announcement by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the stamp duty exemption for first-time buyers for homes under £300,000, with a £500,000 limit in London. They carp about it as if it is somehow going to increase the market for first-time buyers, but the cut in stamp duty is likely to way exceed any consequential increase in house prices, so we should welcome it.

We should also welcome the measures the Government are introducing to build more houses, particularly the use of new town development corporations, which were used successfully by the Conservative Government in the 1980s to create whole new towns such as Milton Keynes. The legislation is still on the statute book. The corporations are partnerships formed among the Government, local authorities, the private sector and the social housing sector to build more houses. They worked in the 1980s and we should use them again, and we should make sure that new town development corporations are able to access more land.

I have two suggestions as to how we should alter the planning system. First, we need to alter the material-start system so that when builders get planning permission it is in all cases for only three years. Secondly, they should always have to build out a site in its entirety for services. That would stop house builders from sitting on land—land banking—for an unacceptable period and put an end to the practice of house builders using a vacant site as a bargaining tool to gain planning permission on other sites. Those would be important improvements.

The hon. Member for Wallasey touched on the Brexit divorce bill—the biggest liability this country faces for the next few years. It has been rumoured that we are going to pay £38 billion, which of course includes our obligations for things such as outstanding budget contributions, financial programmes, agriculture, overseas aid, pensions liabilities and decommissioning liabilities. Nevertheless, as my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) so rightly said, in a negotiation for a second-hand car, one does not go in and pay an excessive price; the clever negotiator pays the right price—the minimum price that they can get away with. That is what we ought to do with the EU. To put it into perspective, is not just about that £38 billion; it is about our promise of two years of payments after we leave, which is an additional £8 billion a year or £16 billion in total. That takes us up to some £54 billion, which is more than our entire transport budget and almost as much as our entire defence budget. That is what we have to think about with regard to those very large figures.

In 1945 the USA loaned us £2.2 billion—£87 billion in today’s money—as war reparations, and it took us more than 50 years to pay it off. I hope at the very least that we will do two things with this payment, if we actually agree it with the EU. First, it should be paid over a significant number of years. Secondly, it should be linked to our ability to earn money from it—that is, through a trade deal and other deals, which will help us earn and pay it off.

Technology is really important if this country is to remain competitive with our foreign competitors and our productivity is to increase. Thankfully, this country has experienced huge growth in digital innovation. However, we have a shortfall of about 40,000 people with the necessary skills in science, technology, engineering and maths to meet the demands of our economy. My hon. Friend the Minister for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation is present. I am delighted to learn that maths is now the most popular subject in our schools, and I am delighted with the extra money to encourage even more children to take maths at A-level. I am glad that the Chancellor announced that our national infrastructure fund will rise from £23 billion to £33 billion, and I am delighted that the main R and D tax credit to enable our firms to invest in even more infrastructure will be maintained. The Chancellor said that a new high-tech company emerges every hour, which is an amazing figure, and that he wants to cut it to every half an hour.

On education, I was pleased to learn earlier this year, having led a long campaign, that primary and secondary school funding will be maintained so that every child in this country gets a budget that increases in real terms every year, and that the secondary school budget would move up to £4,800 per pupil by 2020, which will begin to eliminate the gap between the lowest funded authorities, such as mine in the f40, and the highest funded authorities such as those in the middle of London. Our commitment to spending the extra £1.3 billion that we announced in our election manifesto has given the Cotswold School £450,000 more than it would have got under the old proposals. That is a welcome boost.

The Chancellor had a very welcome announcement for small businesses. There are 5.5 million small businesses in this country and, as he made clear, they are the engine of jobs and growth, so we need to make sure that they prosper. I welcome the fact that, contrary to the leaks about the Budget—thank goodness that leaks are often wrong—we are not going to reduce the VAT threshold, because that would not only introduce more bureaucracy for small businesses, but bring them within the making business digital threshold, which would, at a stroke, introduce even more bureaucracy for them.

[Tom Brake (Carshalton and Wallington) (LD)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that one of the biggest generators of bureaucracy for small businesses, particularly those that import and export, will be new customs arrangements if those are introduced?

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

The PAC has done a lot of work on customs and I am hopeful about new IT and the introduction of the customs declaration service to replace the existing IT service. Customs will experience a huge increase in the number of VAT declarations when we leave the EU, and it has a really difficult job policing goods that are wrongly coming into this country. Customs needs to take that into account.

I have almost come to the end of my speech. On bureaucracy for small businesses, it is essential that we try to keep it down and help them wherever possible. I am particularly pleased, as I am sure are businesses in the Cotswolds, that the small business rate relief will be maintained. Rates can be a real burden for small businesses with premises on which they pay high rents and high rates, particularly in an area such as the Cotswolds. Those that have managed to be taken out of the rates ambit altogether will be very glad to hear that they will not be brought back into it in the coming year, which is what they had feared. Residents and businesses in the large rural area of the Cotswolds will be particularly glad to see the freeze on fuel duty for yet another year; that will help them. Incidentally, I am sure that individuals in the Cotswolds—and, indeed, the entire country—will be really pleased to see the freeze on wine, spirits and cider. I am sure that that will be particularly welcome.

To sum up, this has been a prudent Budget—nothing more than I would expect from my right hon. Friend the Chancellor, who is doing a great job for this country with his economic stewardship. I am sure that our economy will go from strength to strength, that our education will get better, that there will be more high-tech IT jobs and that there will continue to be a record number of jobs and of apprenticeships.

If the Labour party had anything to cheer about, it would surely be that we are employing a record number of people in this country. I would have thought that it would be particularly pleased at the Chancellor’s announcement that poverty is reducing in this country and that child poverty has reduced by more than 1 million in the past 10 years. [Interruption.] That is what the Chancellor said; I am only repeating it. I know that the Opposition would not like the figures to be correct, but the fact is that they describe what is happening.