Budget Resolutions

Helen Hayes Excerpts

Monday 1st November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

I put on the record my role as a vice-president of the Local Government Association.

After almost two years of the gruelling covid-19 pandemic, with the economic consequences of Brexit starting to bite hard, and on the eve of the COP26 climate summit, our best last chance to save our planet from the consequences of catastrophic global warming, we needed a Budget fit for the task—a Budget to deliver a net zero economy, a just transition, skills and jobs fit for the 21st century, fair taxation and public services to provide support for everyone who needs it. The Chancellor’s Budget fell far short on every one of those measures.

First, in relation to the climate emergency, this needed to be a Budget to make tackling climate change a prism for all economic decision making and all public spending. The Government could have entered their COP presidency leading the way on a just transition to a net zero economy, harnessing the opportunities to create new high-quality green jobs and deliver better public health and wellbeing, and ensuring that no part of the United Kingdom was left behind. Instead, we have the embarrassment of a Government rushing out their net zero strategy at the 11th hour before COP26 got under way, refusing to rule out new fossil fuel extraction in the North sea and in Cumbria, lowering air passenger duty for domestic flights, and failing to invest in retrofitting at anything like the scale required to decarbonise our homes.

Secondly, while any additional funding for adult social care is welcome for a sector deep in crisis, the Government’s approach of allocating arbitrary sums without an overall plan for reform is simply not good enough. It is hard to overstate how exhausted and desperate many who work in the social care sector feel as we head into this winter. The trauma of the pandemic, endemic underfunding, low pay and the ever increasing needs of an ageing population have left social care on its knees.

The Local Government Association and London Councils are clear that this Budget will not make a substantive difference to the funding pressures on adult social care now. It will not fund a real-terms pay increase for social staff, it will not stop social services contracts being handed back to councils, and it will not ensure that the million people who need social care but are not currently receiving any support can live with independence and dignity.

The theme for today’s debate is levelling up—an incoherent, ill-defined concept that has now been honoured with its own Department. Our experience in London is that levelling up almost invariably involves cutting funding from our hard-pressed public services and from some of the most deprived communities anywhere in the country, and handing it to areas where the Tories find it politically expedient to do so. A coherent approach to levelling up would not pit north against south, or city against village. It would be underpinned by an industrial strategy and a net zero strategy for the country as a whole, and would fund and empower local councils and communities to tackle disadvantage wherever it is found.

Finally, let me say something about education. Kevan Collins had a plan for levelling up, helping children across the country to recover from the disadvantage and hardship of the covid-19 pandemic. It would cost £15 billion. Instead, the Chancellor has set out the paltry ambition to return to 2010 levels of per-pupil expenditure. While I welcome his sudden recognition that austerity has been bad for our children, is it not a terrible indictment of almost 12 years of Tory government that the only thing he has to offer them is to give back to the next generation some of what his own Government so cruelly took away from the last? For London schools, the Tories’ version of levelling up always means doing us down, snatching away resources under the banner of “fair funding”—except that it is not fair at all. The children and young people in my constituency have a right to well-funded schools, with the resources and extracurricular activities that they need, but they have suffered the worst cuts anywhere in the country, at more than £1,000 per pupil.

Our country faces very serious challenges, and this Government are simply not up to the task of dealing with them.