Budget Resolutions

Imran Hussain Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Imran Hussain (Bradford East) (Lab)]

In recent weeks, the Chancellor has been promising us a Budget that would look to the future, a Budget that would reshape our economy and a Budget that would level up our left-behind communities. Working people across the country hoped for action that would tackle the growing cost of living that they face each day, but what we got last Wednesday was a Budget without the vision and imagination to tackle the challenges that we face in society. We got a Budget that is stuck in the past, unable to confront the realities of the future, and a Budget that perpetuates an economy that serves the richest, while trampling over the poorest, which proves that, under this Government, levelling up is just a slogan and words, not real action.

Bradford is one of the most deprived areas and it is in the most desperate need of levelling up. All it really got from this Budget was a new sports and enterprise centre on Squire Lane, which is a project that was brought forward, developed and signed off by me years ago when I was deputy leader of the council. It was signed off and brought about to tackle the rampant health inequalities in our city, but it was starved of funds and never built because of a decade of Government austerity.

While this Government today tell us that, in Bradford, they are levelling up and giving us much-needed money for the new sports and enterprise centre, which, of course, is very welcome, the reality remains that, if they had not made the ideological austerity cuts over the last decade that devastated councils such as Bradford, we would have been able to fund this ourselves a decade ago. So I am not going to take Conservative Members telling me that they have done a huge favour on Bradford, levelled up and tackled poverty and the real issues that we face in the district.

In the time that this Government have taken to provide funds for that centre, the inequalities—particularly health inequalities—faced by those in Bradford have only grown. The life expectancy of someone living in Bradford is almost 10 years lower than in other parts of the country. Let us take a moment to look at that. If a person lives in certain parts of the Bradford district, they are likely to live 10 years less than if they lived in a leafy suburb away from Bradford. I ask Conservative Members: what does this Budget do to address health inequalities in Bradford? What does the Budget do to address the fact that up to 40% of children in my constituency will again today be denied a hot meal? What does this Budget do to address the fact that working families in my constituency will continue to use food banks? Those are the questions. It is easy to get caught up in statistics, but the reality remains that this Budget will do nothing to address those real issues in my constituency, which means that we now have to go even further and present new initiatives to tackle the widening inequalities in our society.

Ultimately, this Budget came nowhere close to what people in Bradford need. Throughout the Chancellor’s 100-page Red Book, there was no commitment to reverse the cruel cut to universal credit that will take £1,000 a year out of the pockets of some of the poorest in Bradford. There was no plan to tackle the rapid decline of Bradford’s high street by reforming and replacing an outdated business rates system that penalises small, family-run businesses to satisfy the greed of large multinationals. There was no pledge to deliver Northern Powerhouse Rail, which will run from Manchester to Leeds, through a station in Bradford city centre that would draw investment into our region and act as a firm symbol of levelling up.

Even the end of a public sector pay freeze to tackle the cost of living crisis failed to acknowledge that it was this Government and their decade-long pay restraint that created a cost of living crisis for those working in the public sector in Bradford. Although investment in education and healthcare is welcome, it will fail to make up for a decade of austerity, cuts and underinvestment that has created so much pain and misery for so many across the district.

As is so often the case under this Government, the cost of the Budget’s failures will fall on the shoulders not of the Chancellor or his constituents, but of my constituents in Bradford and other places like my constituency. It is in the pockets of people in Bradford that the cost of living is being felt the most. It is my constituents—on wages lower than the national average and employed on insecure contracts—who will be hit hardest by rising food prices, spiralling energy bills, and soaring rents and mortgages, only to be hit again by tax rises that mean that households will be paying £3,000 more in tax in the next five years than when this Prime Minister took office.

Time does not permit me to go on, and I want to be fair to colleagues. The fact is that the only people levelled up by this Budget are the millionaire bankers sipping champagne on their short-haul flights. The clear conclusion is that, just as we have seen every year under this Tory Government, this is a Budget by the rich for the rich.