Finance (No. 2) Bill

Debate between Helen Whately and Liz McInnes

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 11th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes),although I could not help but notice that her speech was almost entirely about spending, with almost nothing about raising money for that spending. The Finance Bill is about raising revenue.

[Liz McInnes]

If the £10 billion was spent on Crossrail for the north, it would bring revenues of £85 billion. I have talked about spending and raising money.

[Helen Whately]

I appreciate the hon. Lady’s point, but I still think that she very much spoke about spending and not about the content of this Finance Bill.

Our job in this House is to make difficult decisions not just on what we spend money on but on how we raise that money—who we tax and what we tax, when we are reluctant to tax people and would much rather they had the money in their pockets to spend themselves. Our aim is to make things better for our constituents, young or old and those in between. It is not our job to make promises that cannot be kept, to write cheques that we cannot cash, and just to say things that sound nice, like massive amounts of spending, but might turn out to have nasty consequences like high unemployment. Labour Members may tell us differently, but spending that we cannot afford is not the moral high ground—it is the moral low ground.

This Finance Bill builds on the tough decisions of the Governments led by Conservative Prime Ministers over the past seven years who have reduced the deficit by 75%, while as of next year debt will fall as a share of GDP. Let us not throw that all away, as Labour Members would, with uncosted proposals and unquantified borrowing. As we heard earlier, they could not answer our questions on how much their borrowing would cost.