Huw Merriman
Main Page: Huw Merriman (Conservative - Bexhill and Battle)Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation
Huw Merriman Excerpts
Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)
I warmly support the Budget that the Chancellor delivered today. I hope that the House will permit me to consider how the Budget will impact on my constituents in Bexhill and Battle. Indeed, I contend that my constituency contains many of the attributes and challenges that other hon. Members find in their localities. I will reflect on three key areas that were addressed by the Budget.
The first area is work and welfare. I am pleased that the number of my constituents claiming jobseeker’s allowance has decreased from 1,400 in 2010 to 613. Those aged 18 to 24 account for just 135 of that number, which is down from 385 in 2010. Those figures demonstrate that some of the 2 million new jobs that have been created in the UK have certainly been delivered in my constituency.
I was pleased to hear from the Chancellor that the Government will continue to protect those who, through disability, cannot work and will never be able to do so. Those individuals deserve our care and compassion, and I am pleased that the Government continue to focus their energies on that. I am passionate, however, about giving people the opportunity of work and equally passionate about ensuring that there is not a choice between work and welfare. I am therefore pleased that the welfare cap in my constituency will be reduced to £20,000, which will ensure that work always pays.
Bob Stewart
In my constituency, which is relatively rich, many people go to work and raise a family on well under £20,000.
Huw Merriman
I thank my hon. Friend for making that point. It applies to my constituency, too, which is just further south than his.
It has to be right that those who work should not feel disadvantaged and as though there is no incentive to work. The cap of £26,000 has been a great success. Indeed, the Labour party has adopted that policy, too.
I support the withdrawal of housing benefit from 18 to 21-year-olds. It cannot be right that people of that age who are in work are required to save up for a home of their own or to pay rent, whereas those who are not in work are able to move out and reside in housing that is paid for by the state.
In pledging to deliver a balanced economy that will permit the creation of a further 1 million jobs, I believe that we can help the 613 jobseekers in my constituency to find work and give them a fairer future than the downward spiral that benefits and welfare inevitably bring.
The second area is productivity. I welcome the Chancellor’s commitment to improve Britain’s productivity, particularly his recognition that investing in transport infrastructure will help towards that end. Bexhill and Battle has poor transport connections to London and beyond. Trains from Bexhill take almost two hours and spend more time going backwards or on pause than moving forward.
The Chancellor has brought the news that the Government will support a new high-speed rail service that could take my constituents from Bexhill to London in 78 minutes. Indeed, I noticed a typo on page 79 of the Budget report, where it speaks of the line going just to Hastings and Rye. I hope the author will ensure that that says Bexhill as well, which is planned to be on the route. The new rail link will help us attract new employers to the constituency.
Thanks to the Government, a new link road is being built from Bexhill to Hastings, which will deliver thousands of houses, a 42-acre business park and a country park, all of which will attract high-skilled jobs and boost our economic regeneration and productivity.
In addition—this is still linked to productivity—I welcome the commitment to freeze fuel duty for a further year. In a rural constituency such as the one I represent, a saving of £10 a tank will continue to remain a huge boost. I welcome the commitment to road building and the improvements via the new vehicle excise duty that—when it is introduced—will ring-fence motoring taxes for roads. I would be delighted if the Chancellor wished to spend some of that money on dualling the A21. The productivity gains from new roads, rail, housing and jobs will be immense in my constituency, and I welcome Government spending in that sphere.
My third point is about making work pay. Increasing the tax allowance will take more than 800 of my constituents out of the tax system altogether in 2016. A further 50,000 of my 80,000 electors will benefit from having their tax allowances increased. Those changes show that the reward for those who work and move off benefits will be given to the worker, not taken back by the Government and merely recycled or wasted. To that end, I spoke yesterday in this House, and in urging a reform of tax credits and encouraging employers to pay their staff more, I suggested that
“there is a case for the Government sharing the cost of this reduction with employers…with some of the savings being recycled as further corporation tax…reductions.”—[Official Report, 7 July 2015; Vol. 598, c. 274.]
Huw Merriman
Indeed. I was therefore delighted that the Chancellor may perhaps have watched my speech on the television, and I certainly welcome his commitment to reduce corporation tax to 19% in 2017, and to 18% in 2020. With that cut in corporation tax and the increase of the employment allowance to £3,000, funding should be in place to ensure that the new living wage of £7.20 in 2016 and £9 by 2020 will not penalise employers—a vital requirement if we are to continue to encourage employers to expand and create more new jobs.
Let me highlight three further measures that I believe will help my constituents in Bexhill and Battle, due to its demographics. First, we have an ageing population and the increase in the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million will be welcomed by those who have worked hard and want to leave a legacy to their children. Secondly, my constituency contains a number of small businesses and a farming industry, and my constituents will welcome the proposal to keep the annual investment allowance at £200,000 per annum. Thirdly, my constituents regularly let me know that they are concerned about the UK potentially not meeting its commitments to NATO’s 2% spending pledge. My postbag will be all the lighter for the Government maintaining that commitment.
As with any Budget, there is a balance to be struck and the measures must be reviewed to assess impact. I am passionate about building new houses for constituents, particularly at an affordable level. Reducing housing rent by 1% at a time when we are rightly promoting the right to buy for housing association tenants must not cause house building to slow down in that sector due to the inability to tap markets for finance. This Government built more council houses in five years than the Opposition did in 13.
Harry Harpham (Sheffield, Brightside and Hillsborough) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman mentioned affordable housing. Is he aware that the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts that a 1% reduction in rent will lead to 40,000 fewer affordable homes being built over that period? Does he think that his constituents will welcome that?
Huw Merriman
That brings me to a point raised by the hon. Member for Eltham (Clive Efford). The Government aim to encourage people to buy their social housing. Once they do that, resources will be freed up to build more housing stock. It will also cause house prices to come down, making it easier for all to rent and buy, so, no, I do not agree with that statistic.
I am passionate about giving those from disadvantaged backgrounds the opportunity of a university education. This Government have delivered more students from disadvantaged backgrounds than ever before, and I hope that those from poorer backgrounds are not put off going to university following the announcement that the student maintenance grant will be replaced by a loan. They should not be put off; it is the best investment that a student will ever make, as I know to my benefit.
In conclusion, I wholeheartedly commend this Budget. It rolls back the state and rewards those who make brave decisions and work hard. It maintains our commitment to look after those who cannot look after themselves, and it encourages those who can look after themselves to do so. In bringing them the path to work and prosperity, I believe that this Government will help my constituents and those of all Members.
Louise Haigh (Sheffield, Heeley) (Lab)
Today’s Budget is the final act in a financial crisis that has seen debts moved from the financial sector to the public purse and piled on to individuals who will be comprehensively unable to foot the bill for the Chancellor’s raid on tax credits, housing benefit for under-25s and families with more than two children.
I shall deal with this before hon. Members leap to intervene. The living wage is not set at a level that would permit households to cope without in-work support. The Resolution Foundation, which the Chancellor referenced, has said:
“If in-work support is cut then, as night follows day, the Living Wage will rise.”
Excluding in-work support raises the London living wage to £11.65, revealing the Chancellor’s announcement as mere rhetoric. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Leader of the Opposition said, it is giving with one hand and taking with the other.
The Budget serves notice that we have a Chancellor steadfastly refusing to tackle fundamental issues in our economy that are causing rising levels of household debt. It is ominous to listen to him talk with such confidence, given that significant underlying weaknesses in the economy that have been causing serious concern for some time are completely ignored. He might have wanted a rebalanced economy and a recovery built on rising incomes, but that is simply not happening. High debt, low pay, an economy based on credit and a housing bubble, a deregulated financial sector—back to business as usual.
What was wrong in 2007 remains wrong to this day. It is that we do not have a resilient financial system. In the recently published “Financial System Resilience Index”, the UK ranked lowest of all G7 countries. It is that household debt is rising to levels not seen before—higher even than at the peak of the crisis. Last year alone, it grew by 9%, which was an increase of £20 billion on households’ credit cards and other debts. It is that the housing bubble continues apace and markets are overheating. Exhortations from the Governor of the Bank of England have been ignored. He warned:
“What happens if households are borrowing at high multiples is they have to economise on everything else in order to pay their mortgages. And if enough people are highly indebted, that has a big macroeconomic impact… There is the possibility that currently responsible lending standards become irresponsible to reckless.”
These issues are all interlinked. We have shifted the debts of the financial sector on to the public balance sheet, and now, in the final act of the financial crisis, the Chancellor is shifting it on to individuals. Ours is an economy built on the same old mistakes. I do not think that anyone in this place would care to suggest any longer that we are beyond the days of boom and bust—we are witnessing this in the international markets as we speak. While the world is understandably focused on Greece, China’s markets are in little short of meltdown. Unfortunately, crashes are far from being a thing of the past, and I would suggest that in the UK we are closer to the next one than we are to the last.
Before I entered this place, I worked in the City of London, and I can report to the House that the culture of risk taking, short-termism and excessive pay and bonuses remains as prevalent today as it was before the crash—although I hasten to add that I was not privy to such excessive pay.
Huw Merriman
Does the hon. Lady not agree that segregating retail banks from investment banks makes it less likely that if the investment bank collapses, it will contaminate the commercial bank? I declare an interest, having worked on the unwinding of the Lehman Brothers estate.
Louise Haigh
I absolutely agree that separating the investment arm from the high street banking arm was one of the answers to the cause of the financial crash, but we have not had an update recently, and as I understand it, the banks are not co-operating on this issue—either with each other or with the regulators. It would therefore be very helpful to have on update on that from the Minister.
The financial sector heaped masses of debts on to ordinary people—our constituents. We do not want it to pay; we are not vengeful sorts in this House—we want it to reform so that what happened can never happen again. However, instead of learning from the mistakes that I accept the last Labour Government made—mistakes that would have enabled the Government to build a sustainable economy in which everyone can share—the Conservatives have imposed their ideological agenda on a terrible crisis in order to shrink the state and entrench inequality. That is why the UK’s recovery was delayed by three years after America’s and Germany’s, squandering billions of pounds in lost output. However, what matters now is what the Government will do about that. The problem is that the Government are not merely acting with intransigence; they are exacerbating the problems.
The measures in today’s Budget on tax credits may take debt off the Government books, but they heap it directly on to some of the most low-paid and the most vulnerable and those who can just about afford their mortgage, if they have one at all. Fourteen-hundred pounds for a working parent who lives on their own—that is what the Government have saved, but do they think that a lone parent can afford to lose £1,400 a year? He or she will take out credit cards to pay for their children’s school trip, clothes, the rent or the mortgage, and household debt will rise and rise. Turning maintenance grants into student loans, passing debt straight off the Government’s books on to those who can least afford it and who are the most averse to debt—a generation of young people is being created that is not just accustomed to personal debt but reliant on it.
The Chancellor said today that he wanted to move away from an economy based on debt, but he made no mention of records of household debt. Indeed, some of the OBR’s forecasts were not mentioned by the Chancellor today—for example, the forecast that the ratio of total household debt to income will rise by 26% by 2020, most of it unsecured debt, an additional £48 billion of which the OBR expects to be added by 2020, compared with the March outlook. Overall household debt is now expected to reach 167% of household income by 2020, while household disposable income will be down by 1.5% in 2020, compared with the estimate at the previous Budget.
Private debt turned into public debt and put on to the backs of individuals, and the same mistakes being repeated: if this were a Budget genuinely designed to help working people, we would have seen measures to tackle the inherent issues in our economy. We would have seen genuine ambition on lifting wages, not mere rhetoric. We would have seen action to lower housing costs, commitments to increase social housing, and measures to militate against spiralling household debt. Instead, we have seen yet more tinkering around the edges, just like in every Budget in the last five years. Not only does this Budget hurt working people; it stores up yet more problems for the future that it will take at least a generation to fix.