Infrastructure (Financial Assistance) Bill

Debate between Hazel Blears and Rachel Reeves

Monday 17th September 2012 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves (Leeds West) (Lab)]

We will not oppose the Bill on Second Reading, but we do not think it remotely adequate to meet the scale of the challenge we now face: the longest double-dip recession since the war, record levels of youth and long-term unemployment, dangerously low levels of business investment, and as a result, deficit reduction way off track, with borrowing up by a quarter this year. The longer this situation continues, the higher the price for businesses, taxpayers and working families in the future: permanent damage to our long-term productivity and competitiveness, and billions of pounds in additional unplanned Government borrowing.

The Opposition have been urging the Government to act and we have repeatedly identified infrastructure investment as an urgent priority. However, this is not the plan it purports to be. The Prime Minister said that he would “cut through the dither”, but he has simply created another distraction—a fig leaf for their own inaction; a peashooter where we needed a big bazooka. At a time when we need to be bold if we are to boost business confidence, to come out with something half-hearted and hesitant risks making things worse.

Before proceeding, I would like to apologise for that fact that, as Mr Speaker and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury are already aware, I cannot be present for the winding up of this debate.

Let us remind ourselves of the background to the Bill. Over the summer, we learned that the UK economy had entered its third quarter of negative growth—the longest double-dip recession in British post-war history. Unemployment remains unacceptably high; youth and long-term unemployment is a national disgrace; and headline employment figures conceal endemic under-employment. Record numbers are working fewer hours than they want to, and record numbers are trapped in temporary work. The Chancellor’s promise of expansionary fiscal contraction has come to nothing.

A Government who proudly proclaimed on page 1, paragraph 1 of their coalition agreement that eradicating the deficit and securing the recovery were their No. 1 priority are now midway through their term of office. What do they have to show for themselves? They have an economy that is smaller than when the Government’s measures began to take effect and, at the last count, £150 billion in additional debt—a figure that is likely to rise further, with borrowing up by a quarter this year. As the former US Treasury Secretary writes in this morning’s Financial Times,

“the reality is that the primary determinant of fiscal health in both the US and UK over the medium term will be the rate of growth. An extra percentage point of growth maintained for five years would reduce Britain’s debt-to-GDP ratio by close to 10 percentage points whereas austerity policies that slowed growth could even backfire in the narrow sense of raising debt-to-GDP ratios and turning debt unsustainability into a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

[Hazel Blears]

Would my hon. Friend describe this as plan A, plan A-plus, or plan B? [Interruption.]

[Rachel Reeves]

From a sedentary position, my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham East (Chris Leslie) suggests “plan F for fail”, and I could not agree more. I wish this was a plan B, but I do not think it is. It is more words, when what we require is action. Yet the Government do not listen to the evidence—they just plough on with a plan that everybody else knows has failed.