Jeremy Hunt
Main Page: Jeremy Hunt (Conservative - Godalming and Ash)Department Debates - View all Jeremy Hunt's debates with the Cabinet Office
(1 month, 3 weeks ago)
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Jeremy Hunt (Godalming and Ash) (Con)
It is a pleasure to open this day of the Budget debate with you in the Chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, for what will be my last contribution as shadow Chancellor. I am aware that may be a relief to Members on the Government Benches, and possibly to those on the Opposition Benches as well.
Yesterday’s Budget was the biggest tax-raising Budget in British history. It was a huge tax on business and takes our tax burden up to German levels for the first time. After the pandemic, the previous Government also put up taxes, but we started to bring them down, because higher tax leads to lower growth. Indeed, the Office for Budget Responsibility said that yesterday’s £40 billion of tax rises would lead to lower pay, lower living standards, higher prices and more expensive mortgages. Without remorse and without hesitation, a triumphalist Government have ripped up the pre-election promises that they made in the biggest ever assault on our economic competitiveness since the 1970s.
Let us look at the promises cast aside so casually. The Chancellor said that she would not change the debt target, because she was “not going to fiddle the figures or make something different to get better results”. Yesterday, she did exactly that. In May she said that Labour policy
“will be fully costed and fully funded. No ifs, no ands, no buts”—
and no additional tax rises. A total of 30 times this year, she promised not to do exactly what she did yesterday. She even said that she wanted to bring the burden of tax down. Ordinary families, small businesses and working people believed her. Yesterday, they were betrayed.
It went further. When we said in the election that taxes would go up by £2,000 per household over four years, the Leader of the Opposition at the time accused the then Prime Minister of a deliberate lie. Three months on, they will go up not by £2,000 over four years, but by £2,000 every year. Paul Johnson called it a
“straightforward breach of a manifesto commitment”.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has today said:
“The continued pretence that these changes will not affect working people risks further undermining trust.”
The OBR said that 76% of the impact of the national insurance rise would pass through to lower wages.
And because the Government planned this all along, we now know why they rushed so fast to concoct the fiction of a black hole—something that was not corroborated by the OBR yesterday. It was cover not just to raise national insurance, but to impose countless other tax rises on working people: capital gains tax up; energy taxes up; stamp duty up; and taxes on family farms up—something we will oppose, for the sake of farmers up and down the country.
Working people whose wages the Chancellor promised to protect will see them go down; businesses whose profits fund new investment will see them raided; markets to which she promised stability are absorbing the biggest tax-and-spend Budget in a generation; and all of us on the outside are left wondering which is worse, the damage to the economy or the damage to trust.
Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)
There is not one person on the Opposition Benches who is not concerned about the inheritance tax changes. If I am honest, I do not think there is one Member on the Government Benches who represents a farming community and is not also worried. The measure has been universally condemned by all the farmers I have spoken to, and I live in a farming community. The National Farmers Union, the Ulster Farmers Union and others are up in arms about this inheritance tax. The sum of £1 million draws everybody into that scheme, and because of that, we must vote against it. I say to those on the Government Benches: guys, you have got it wrong, and this time you will be condemned. When it comes to election time, the people who you have hurt will remember.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)
Please stop using “you”, Mr Shannon.
Jeremy Hunt
I thank my hon. Friend—I say “my hon. Friend” because he is a great friend to us—for what he has said and I could not agree with him more. When we talk about stability, anybody who has run a business knows that the most stable businesses in the country are family businesses that are passed from generation to generation. This is not just about farms, but about any small businesses that are passed down through the generations. This is a hammer blow to their plans to invest for the future.
I wish to move on, because the main argument that the Government make—I am sure that we will hear this from the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster—is that all this is necessary to improve public services. We on the Conservative Benches want to say, right up front, that it is absolutely right to prioritise public services. As Health Secretary, I negotiated an increase in the NHS budget of £20 billion a year, and, in this year’s Budget, I increased it by a further £6 billion. Many times I said as Chancellor that I wanted to avoid austerity cuts to public services. We would have done so this time, not by using tax rises that harm working families and businesses, but by taking difficult decisions on welfare reform and productivity—decisions that were ducked yesterday.
Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (North Cotswolds) (Con)
May I suggest that the difference between my right hon. Friend’s Budget and this one is that, although he gave considerable extra increases to the national health service, he coupled them with a need to increase productivity? There was no word in yesterday’s Budget about increasing productivity in the health service.
Jeremy Hunt
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, but there was an even more basic difference between our Budget earlier this year and this one: as a result of measures in our Budget, the growth rate went up, whereas as a result of measures in Labour’s Budget, the growth rate went down.
Reducing the number of working-age people claiming health-related benefits back to pre-pandemic levels would save £34 billion a year. It would bring more people into the workforce and improve the wellbeing of the individuals concerned, but welfare reform was dropped from the King’s Speech, and yesterday’s Budget saw the welfare bill rise by an average of £13 billion a year. According to the OBR, increasing public sector productivity—another area that we did not hear much about—to pre-pandemic levels would raise £20 billion a year. We heard some warm words about that, but delivering it requires difficult negotiations with the unions.
That was too difficult for the Government, who cancelled plans to reduce the civil service to pre-pandemic levels, increased the salaries of train drivers by £10,000, and gave junior doctors a 22% pay rise—all without asking for a single productivity improvement in return. It was no strings for the unions, but no help for 2.5 million pensioners in poverty. The Government should be ashamed. Picking the pockets of businesses, which do not vote, is the easy path, but when it damages economic growth, the result is less money for the NHS, less money for schools and less money for the armed forces, which is why, in the end, Labour Governments always run out of money.
Graeme Downie (Dunfermline and Dollar) (Lab)
The right hon. Member was keen to quote the IFS earlier. Does he also agree with the IFS that
“it was not credible for Jeremy Hunt to claim that planned departmental spending limits would hold”
and there was
“no world in which 2 per cent rises would have happened and been sustained”?
Jeremy Hunt
I always listen to the IFS, and indeed to the Resolution Foundation, very carefully. I think that the IFS was right—[Interruption.] Let me answer the point, if I may. The IFS was right to say that it would be very challenging to hold to 1% spending assumptions, but in the Budget earlier this year I explained exactly how we would do that. I asked the NHS, “How are we going to improve efficiency so that we can live within tight spending limits?” The NHS said, “We need to overhaul the IT systems.” We gave the NHS £3.5 billion to do so, and in return it was able to deliver 2% productivity savings.
Jeremy Hunt
The hon. Member shakes his head, but yesterday the Chancellor said that she was going to roll that out to the whole of the public sector. I think that it is possible to do so; my concern is that doing so involves difficult decisions, and the track record of this Government is that when those decisions involve a conversation with the unions, they run a mile.
The final spurious claim from the Chancellor was that yesterday’s draconian measures were necessary because she had received the worst economic inheritance since world war two. Not a single independent economist supports that claim, and it is not hard to see why. Inflation is at 1.7%, around half what it was in 2010. Unemployment is at 4%, nearly half the 2010 level. If the public finances were in the same state today that they were in back in 2010, the deficit would now be £160 billion higher, which is the entire budget of the NHS. Instead, we left behind a deficit that had been halved, and was lower than that of France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States.
Luke Murphy (Basingstoke) (Lab)
If the last Government’s attempts at levering investment into the economy were so successful, why in 2022 was the UK 28th out of 31 OECD countries for business investment? The truth is that the last Government failed to reform the economy to lever in that investment to pay for the growth in our public services.
Jeremy Hunt
Let me tell the hon. Gentleman exactly what happened to business investment under the last Government. Since 2010, we attracted more foreign greenfield direct investment than not just anywhere in Europe, but anywhere in the world apart from the United States and China. That was foreigners voting with their dollars as to where they wanted to invest in the world, and they said, “Outside the United States and China, there is nowhere that we want to invest more than the United Kingdom.” Compare that with what the OBR said about yesterday’s Budget: business investment will not just fall, but fall by even more than the amount of the extra investment caused by public investment going up.
Luke Murphy
Does the right hon. Gentleman deny that business investment was the lowest in the G7 under his Government? If the Government were so successful, does he also deny that in that respect the UK was 28th out of the 31 OECD countries?
Jeremy Hunt
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that for decades we have had lower business investment in the UK economy than our peers. That was why, in the autumn statement a year ago, I introduced full expensing, which was the big business tax request, to make it more attractive to invest in new factories, capital, machinery, here than anywhere else in the OECD, and that was widely welcomed.
The other part of our legacy—the so-called worst inheritance since the second world war—was the fastest-growing economy in the G7, and one that the IMF said would grow faster than Italy, France, Germany or Japan over the next five years. The Government probably thought it was a clever political trick to rubbish their inheritance, but trash-talking the British economy has real- world consequences. We see the sharpest decline in consumer confidence since the beginning of the pandemic. Lloyds bank, KPMG and the Institute of Directors all saying that business confidence has plummeted. The former chief economist of the Bank of England says that the Chancellor has generated “fear and foreboding” and uncertainty among consumers, among business, and among investors in UK plc. And we see higher bond yields, leading to higher debt interest payments. Careless talk costs jobs and money, and this Government have been careless.
What every economist does, however, agree is that if we are to increase our living standards to German or American levels we need higher productivity, and that means more investment. But according to the OBR, yesterday’s measures will mean lower investment overall. Higher public investment is more than offset by lower business investment because of huge tax increases. Lloyds bank said that the increase in employers’ national insurance is a “handbrake” on investment. UKHospitality said it is a “tax on jobs” and
“makes it harder to employ people and to take a risk on recruitment and expansion.”
The Federation of Small Businesses says it will shrink small business employment, and the Institute of Directors has likened it to the poll tax.
Max Wilkinson (Cheltenham) (LD)
The shadow Chancellor mentioned hospitality. Overnight I had discussions with the local hospitality industry in Cheltenham. They had two pieces of feedback. The first was that they were very worried about some of yesterday’s announcements on reliefs and national insurance, and the second was that the Budget was not as bad as the Liz Truss Budget. I wonder whether he preferred yesterday’s Budget or the Liz Truss one.
Jeremy Hunt
I actually liked neither. I was the person who reversed the decisions made in the mini-Budget, but I will say this: at least Liz Truss wanted to grow the economy and said so explicitly. What we had yesterday is a Budget where the Government’s official forecaster said the impact would be lower growth, fewer jobs and lower investment.
We were promised the most pro-growth Government in history, but in just 17 weeks we have ended up with German taxes and French labour laws, higher taxes, higher mortgages, less investment, lower wages, lower living standards and lower growth, less money for public services on which we all depend, and less money in the pockets of working people—same old Labour, same old spin. It didn’t end well before and it won’t end well this time, either.
Pat McFadden
Let me read what the OBR has said:
“The Treasury did not share information with the OBR about the large pressures on RDEL, about the unusual extent of commitments against the reserve… had this information been made available, a materially different judgement…would have been reached.”
Jeremy Hunt
Perhaps the right hon. Gentleman ought to read the next paragraph, in which the OBR says that it is “not possible to judge” how much those pressures would have been offset by savings elsewhere, which demonstrates that they were within the range of the normal cost reductions that a Chief Secretary to the Treasury would make ahead of any Budget.
Pat McFadden
The right hon. Gentleman suggests that things got better after February. They did not; they got worse, and that is how we got to £22 billion. This is not just a verdict about what happened but an indictment of the Conservative party’s final period in office. The truth is that, under his watch, the Treasury had stopped doing the basic job of controlling expenditure.
Announcements were made with no money set aside, the asylum and hotel bill was funded by emptying the country’s reserves within the first few months of the financial year, hospital building programmes were announced without the necessary funds set aside to pay for them, a pay award sat on a Secretary of State’s desk while they looked the other way, and compensation schemes were announced without the full funds being set aside to pay for them. That was an irresponsible dereliction of duty that has led to us picking up the pieces and to the right hon. Gentleman attacking the independent watchdog that was set up by his own party. Even his predecessor, the former Member for Spelthorne, admitted this morning that Labour is clearing up the Tory mess. If Conservative Members are more out of touch with reality than the former Member for Spelthorne, let me tell them that that is not a good place to be.
The right hon. Gentleman referred to the IFS, which said this morning that the Chancellor
“is not wrong to stress that she got a hospital pass on the public finances.”