Jack Dromey
Main Page: Jack Dromey (Labour - Birmingham, Erdington)Department Debates - View all Jack Dromey's debates with the HM Treasury
(11 years, 9 months ago)
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Mr Osborne
I am not sure that that was worth waiting for. Let me say to the hon. Gentleman that he either thinks it is important for us to confront our debt problem—in which case he should support me as we make the difficult decisions that will enable us to do that—or he thinks that that is not important, and that we can take a difficult situation and make it very much worse. No amount of handwritten notes will help him in those circumstances. The main handwritten note from the Labour party that I remember is the one that said there was no money left.
Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)
In the name of protecting our triple A rating, the Chancellor cut £4 billion of affordable housing investment, causing house building to collapse, pushing housing benefit bills up, and creating the biggest housing crisis in a generation. Rather than continuing to borrow to pay the costs of failure, will he now endorse the shadow Chancellor’s call for investment in affordable house building to create jobs and apprenticeships and to get the economy moving, which he has so signally failed to do?
Mr Osborne
That is a call for yet more borrowing. At least the hon. Gentleman is happy to advocate that in the House of Commons, whereas the shadow Chancellor dare not talk about his economic policy.
The capital spending in the plans that we inherited from the last Labour Cabinet—which, presumably, were agreed to by all members of that Cabinet—was lower than the capital spending in the plans that we have now. Why? Because we have made difficult decisions on welfare bills and other areas of resource spending in order to invest in capital. As for housing, with schemes such as Firstbuy and NewBuy and the new housing guarantees, we are getting behind the housing industry. [Interruption.] The hon. Gentleman says “Going down”, but the rate of housing starts under the last Labour Government was the lowest since the 1920s. That is the situation with which they left us.