Budget Resolutions

Geoffrey Clifton-Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 30th October 2018 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right, and we can only have a sustainable NHS if the social care system is also properly supported.

The social care Green Paper to be published later this year will set out the options to meet the unprecedented demographic challenge—and what a challenge. Some 70% of people in residential care homes now have dementia. The number of people with dementia is set to rise from 850,000 today to over 1 million in less than a decade. The number of people of working age in need of care is rising and is set to increase by almost half by 2035. Yet, despite these pressures, 83% of adult social care settings are now rated good or outstanding by the Care Quality Commission. That is the highest level since assessments began. As a society, we need to address the pressures on social care so that everyone can live in dignity and we can have a situation that is sustainable for the long term.

The Green Paper will bring forward a range of proposals to reform our social care system. I pay tribute to the excellent cross-party work of the Health and Social Care Committee and the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee, which are helping to build a consensus behind potential solutions. This is exactly the sort of long-term cross-party work that we need to see, when fair-minded people from across the House come together to address the challenges of the future, and I will work with anyone from any party to get this right.

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

I listened with care to my right hon. Friend’s very welcome remarks on yesterday’s “Today” programme about having parity of esteem between mental health and physical health, and I welcome the announcement in the Budget of £250,000 for children’s crisis centres. Sadly, people in society now have complex mental health problems at a younger and younger age. In order to make these policies work, will the Secretary of State ensure that there is a sufficient number of well trained staff in the NHS to deal with these mental health problems?

[Matt Hancock]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right; he has put his finger on an incredibly important point. As we spend £20 billion extra on the NHS, we are going to ensure that we train up and attract the people who are going to do the caring.

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[Mr Sheerman]

I hear what the hon. Lady says, but let us be serious. I recommend that she goes away and looks at a rather good book that I have recently read called “Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon” by Gretchen Morgenson. Read it and learn it, because that was what we came through.

The Chancellor’s remarks yesterday did not really touch on many of the issues that affect my community. The fact is that we have a hospital in danger that suffers due to a private finance initiative scheme. All the Chancellor said was that Labour was responsible for PFI. I have been here long enough to know that the great charm offensive on PFIs was led by John Major. PFIs were the fashion among Members on all Benches. As Chairman of the Education Committee, I saw good PFIs and bad PFIs, but I also saw a lot of smart City types who danced rings around local authorities and local health authorities and gave them a rotten deal. That is the truth of PFIs—there were good ones and bad ones, but a lot of City spivs made a lot of money out of them. Nothing that the Chancellor said yesterday will rescue my local hospital and health trust from that burden.

[Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown]

Is the hon. Gentleman aware that 90% of all PFIs were signed under a Labour Government? Yesterday the Chancellor took steps to make sure that there will be no more.

[Mr Sheerman]

The Chancellor took no steps to help those parts of the country that are in trouble due to PFIs.

Watching the television and reading the papers, my constituents are not fooled: they know that what was left out yesterday was that whatever Brexit deal is struck, it will not be as good as staying in the European Union—that is the truth of it. I come here to represent my constituents, and I know that we are moving towards a disaster for their living standards, their health standards and everything else that will touch their lives over the coming years. This is a year of crisis. Just as we had the crisis of the great depression and the crisis in 2009, this will be the next crisis, and we need people at the Dispatch Box who will take on their role as leaders. I do not mean people such as the former Prime Minister and Chancellor who, when they lost the referendum, ran away from their responsibilities and from leadership. Where are they now? Writing for the Evening Standard I suppose, or writing their memoirs in their man caves.

Being in this House and representing our constituents is a grave responsibility. The job does not come and go—we do not want people who try a bit of time as Chancellor of the Exchequer and a bit of time as Prime Minister but then disappear. The great people who have been at that Dispatch Box are the people who have had values, showed leadership, and led this country in good time and in bad times. The fact of the matter is that we are heading for a very bad time indeed if we leave the European Union on bad terms, but that was not mentioned. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, at this time of crisis and impending disaster for our country, did not have the courage to mention Brexit more than once—that is the truth, and my constituents want me to say that today.

At this time of the year, I am, like many in the Chamber, wearing my poppy. I have just been reading a lovely new history about the first world war. The fact is that right in the middle of that war, everybody knew that it was unwinnable and that more and more young men were going to die. Of course, the real responsibility for the first world war lies with us—the politicians. Politicians failed the people of this country. German politicians failed their people, as did French politicians. It was politicians who did it, and they went on killing more and more young people. That was a failure of leadership, a failure of values, a failure of responsibility and a failure to make courageous decisions at the Dispatch Box. We are heading in that direction—not particularly into war, but into the most troubled times when our people will come out impoverished, miserable and unhappy. That will hurt their health, their education and their chance of a good life. For my part, I will do everything that I can to stop the disaster that those on the Government Benches have wished on our people.

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

I am grateful to have caught your eye in this important Budget debate, Mr Deputy Speaker.

I would like to begin by welcoming the Chancellor’s statement and recognising that UK public finances are in a much better shape than they were. Despite the narrative of negativity from the Opposition, the economic facts demonstrate a much more positive reality. I thought the Opposition might welcome the fact that average real wage growth in the public sector is now 3.1%—a 10-year high—or that the Chancellor is predicting an additional 400,000 people in work by 2023. That is on top of the 3 million extra jobs we have created in the last 10 years or so. But nothing came from the Opposition, except that they have 39 uncosted expenditure pledges. That is irresponsible public policy making.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Norfolk (George Freeman) said, we need to build on the high-tech areas of our economy, such as AI, where we are world leaders. We need to ask ourselves why, when we can do the innovation in this country—for example, inventing the world wide web—large IT companies such as Google did not emerge in this country. We need to concentrate on the high-tech sectors of the economy. As my hon. Friend said, that is the way to build ourselves out of the debt created by previous Governments. We need to encourage more students from around the world—the brightest and the best—to come to our universities to study subjects such as computer sciences, so that our universities are at the world forefront of this much needed research.

We need to relentlessly pursue a growth strategy post Brexit. I was delighted that the Chancellor was able to release some of his cushion in this Budget. I hope that we get a deal; I am optimistic that we will get a deal and that this Parliament will pass it. We can then move forward, businesses that are currently shelving investment decisions will make those decisions and the economy will start to thrive.

One thing we can do in the post-Brexit era is to look carefully at the business rates system. I held an Adjournment debate on that earlier this month, in which I pointed out that business rates are not necessarily related to the ability to pay. There are some unfair quirks in the business rates system. For example, a business with a rateable value of under £12,000 gets small business rate relief, but if someone has two businesses with a rateable value of, say, £3,000 each, they get no small business rate relief for either of them.

I welcome the fact that the Government have put £900 million into the rating system, but again, that is a sticking plaster over a system that needs to be thoroughly reformed. I also welcome the fact that there is a third off business rates for retailers with a rateable value of up to £51,000 and a fund for the sustainable transformation of high streets.

Perhaps the most important thing that we need to look at in public services over the next few years is education. As I have alluded to, education is the way that we will be at the forefront of innovation in this country. I have campaigned over a number of years as part of the f40 group to ensure that my schools in Gloucestershire get fair funding. I welcome the additional £475 million for capital spending, but that does not address the current spending problems. In Gloucestershire, we have overspent by £3.2 million on the high-needs block of the education budget. As I mentioned in my intervention on the Health Secretary, that is unfortunately because our children are getting more and more complex health and other problems at an earlier age and need more special assistance in schools.

While I welcome the additional £1.3 billion put into education as a result of our manifesto commitment, it was predicated on the basis that secondary school children throughout the country were to get £3,800 under the fair funding formula. In fact, we will only be able to afford per pupil secondary school funding of £3,600 in Gloucestershire. That additional £200 per pupil would make a huge difference to my schools. I have to report to the House the sad fact that while we had a period of years when our schools in Gloucestershire were going from good to outstanding ratings, that has begun to drop back, which is of great concern.

One way in which the Chancellor has responded to public concern over IT companies such as Google and Facebook is to introduce a digital services tax. I agree with a little bit of what Opposition Members said—I think the tax is unambitious. If we look at the Red Book, we see that the tax is only 2% on profits, with a £25 million annual allowance, and it only covers relevant global revenues in excess of £500 million. The result is that hundreds, and maybe thousands, of relevant small and medium-sized IT companies around the world will be exempt from it. The tax is only predicted to raise £440 million by 2023-24. If we raised more from that tax, we would be able to put more money into schools. The Chancellor needs to look at that carefully. He introduced the diverted profits tax to start to deal with the issue of international companies not paying proper tax in the UK, but that has only raised £388 million this year.

Infrastructure is very important in this country, and I welcome the £25.5 billion for the roads programme. I desperately hope that that extra money will finally secure the construction of the missing link on the A417 in my constituency, for which I have campaigned for 15 years. The Chief Secretary is listening, and I hope I will get good news shortly. We have consulted on it, and we have a preferred route. All we are waiting for is the Government to announce which route they want.

Affordable housing is very important, and I welcome the extra £500 million for the housing infrastructure fund. I welcome the fact that a lot more money is going into housing. Providing housing is one of the most important things that we can do for our young people, and intergenerational fairness needs to be looked at. Low-paid public sector workers in my constituency, whether they be nurses or teachers, often cannot afford to live in the Cotswolds, and we need to look at more innovative ways of providing social housing for them.