Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd June 2010 Commons Chamber

[Jesse Norman (Hereford and South Herefordshire) (Con)]

I congratulate those who made their maiden speeches today.

I welcome the Budget. It was extraordinarily wide-ranging, fair and far-sighted, and I particularly welcome its measures to support small and medium-sized enterprises and to raise the tax threshold for the very poorest in our society. I cannot discuss this without mentioning the glorious success of the repeal of the cider tax, which will be of enormous value and very welcome to my constituents in Hereford. If I were to add a small codicil to that, it would be a call for us to look, in the next Budget or the comprehensive spending review, at rebalancing duty in the beer and cider industries from the off-trade to the on-trade, so as to create more supervised and responsible drinking by young people.

I share the view that it is astonishing that just four Labour Back Benchers should be present for a Budget debate, but the person whom we really miss is the former Prime Minister, the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown). He should be held to account in this House, and he should apologise. Instead, I think that he is sitting in his cave like Ben Gunn in “Treasure Island”, composing his memoirs and dreaming of a triumphant return while the world moves on. All over the country, the owners of bargain bookshops are looking forward hungrily to his next volume filling up the remainder bins.

We can guess the theme already—that the right hon. Gentleman and his party were right all along, but I draw the House’s attention to an interesting asymmetry. When the British economy was supposedly riding high, the reason was said to be the far-sighted economic management of the Government. Now it is struggling, it is supposed to be entirely due to forces outside the previous Government’s control.

However, the facts tell a different story. We can see that by looking at how the UK was before the crash in 2007-08. Let us not forget that 1997 to 2007 was what the Governor of the Bank of England called the NICE decade—a non-inflationary time of consistent expansion. It was the period when worldwide monetary conditions were extremely favourable, with low interest rates and headline inflation in the major industrial countries generally at post-war lows. That was how the UK economy looked in 1997, as a result of the extraordinary economic inheritance that the last Government received.

Even then, however, economic growth was never as good as the previous Government claimed. Our GDP growth per capita in the period until 2007 was barely better than that of the eurozone countries, which were themselves held back by German unification. It was far worse than in similarly open and mature OECD countries. Australia, Canada, the US and New Zealand—every one of them grew faster over the period 1992 to 2007 than did the UK, and their growth was not concentrated in the period 1992 to 1997, but in the latter decade.

We have all made much of the fact that the former Prime Minister claimed to have abolished boom and bust, but the fact is that he presided over four booms—in Government spending, immigration, house price inflation, and personal debt.

The first of those booms was the massive ramp-up in public spending after 2001, which was financed by a huge counter-cyclical increase in Government debt. In other words, the previous Government were able to run a budget deficit of 3% at a time when the economy was supposedly growing at 3%. If that was how that Government handled the boom time, is it any wonder that we are in such a hole today?

The second boom was in immigration, with as many as 1 million immigrants from Poland coming over in the period 1997 to 2007. They added to GDP, pushed up demand and kept a lid on wage inflation.

The third boom was in house price inflation, with a massive ramping up of house prices and the diversion of personal savings into housing, pushing the savings rate down from 8% in the 1990s to 1.1% in 2007 and clobbering savings as a result.

The final boom was in personal debt, which totalled nearly £1.5 trillion before the crash. In 2007, personal debt for the first time in our history was higher than the country’s entire annual economic output, and 80% of that debt was secured on private property. Is it any wonder that the crash, when it came, was so disastrous?

We have noticed that the Opposition have made great claims that this Government do not have a growth strategy—language that is code for an unwillingness on our part to waste public money as the previous Government did. The Opposition’s claims are untrue, however. Exercising control over debt and public spending will have a positive effect on growth, in and of itself, as will the proposed reforms to education, local government and transport policy. Of course, there is more to do to flesh out those policies over the next few months.

[Matthew Hancock (West Suffolk) (Con)]

Is my hon. Friend aware that since the announcements in the Budget today, the interest rates charged on medium-term Government debt have already fallen, which adds to a fall that we have seen since the election of a coalition Government who are prepared to deal with our debts?

[Jesse Norman]

I have been in the Chamber since then, but I thank my hon. Friend very much for that intervention, which brings home the credibility and respect that the Government are already earning in the international capital markets.

The deepest truth is that for all their talk, the previous Government never properly addressed the fundamental drivers of economic growth. Far from it being the case that this Government lack a growth strategy, the previous Government’s strategy over the past 13 years was not sufficient to ensure decent economic growth. The four booms that I have described washed through the economy, leaving us without a world-class infrastructure or adequate broadband coverage, but with a legacy of educational underachievement, low productivity and low innovation—nothing like the energy, competitiveness and entrepreneurship that we need.

[Mr Michael McCann (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman refers to four booms, the first of which was in public investment. Does he think that the public investment that my local authority made—investment that saw new hospitals built, along with 45 new primary schools and 17 new high schools, and which was funded by the Labour Government—was wrong, when Members from his party were supporting it at the time?

[Jesse Norman]

I absolutely accept that a lot of that public investment was very well taken and important. I would not demur from that at all, but there is a huge difference between building buildings and building schools. It is noticeable that levels of educational achievement have not kept pace with the staggering amount of money that was spent under the previous Government. If we had paid more attention to institutions and standards, we would now have a higher quality educational sector.

The cancelled comprehensive spending review was not a thing of great honour or glory for the previous Government. It is noticeable that the Office for Budget Responsibility has downgraded its long-term growth forecasts for this country from the trend rates that we have supposedly enjoyed historically over the past 20 years. That is to say that, instead of the growth rates we should have expected—rates of 2.25%, 2.5% or perhaps even 2.75%—we are now expecting a long-term growth rate of 2.1%. That is the tangible quantification of the lack of success of the investment over the past 13 years, so let us hear no more of Labour’s growth strategy, and let us welcome this Government’s willingness—already recognised in the capital markets—to take this massive task in hand.