HM Revenue and Customs

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd March 2011 Commons Chamber

[Gregg McClymont]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. My suspicion is that it will be a combination of all three. I will come to the skilling aspect, which it seems to me is important alongside the issue of number. If the costs are passed on to taxpayers, I suggest that they will fall disproportionately on those with the least resources—small businesses and poorer taxpayers.

To allude to a point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East, pensioners and other vulnerable groups will have to pay to phone 0845 numbers and will struggle to get through. Beyond the financial cost, there is the psychological anxiety caused by respectable working men and women having to worry that the taxman feels that they are not following the law. The psychological burden on vulnerable groups is worth considering alongside the burdens on businesses and other organisations.

I will focus for a moment on small businesses, although I will not take long as the hon. Member for Chichester somewhat shot my fox on this point. It is clearly okay for the big boys in business and the big organisations that can afford the finest tax accountants money can buy, but for small businesses every minute spent on administration, doing a tax return or conversing with HMRC is a minute less spent running their businesses. Usually, small businesses have much less slack to operate with. As the saying goes, “Time is money”, and any shifting of the burden back on to the taxpayer is likely to be deleterious in the extreme to small businesses and vulnerable groups.

Several Members have referred to efficiency and effectiveness, and that brings me back to staff morale, because staff motivation is particularly important in such a profession—the efficient and effective collection of taxes on behalf of the taxpayer. Inevitably, many of the savings that the Government wish to make will be made through redundancies and restructuring, but the Government approach that package of restructuring and redundancies in the context of an HMRC where staff motivation and industrial relations are already fairly poor.

The figures from the capability review that the Cabinet Office published in 2009 have been quoted, and, as we know, HMRC was the subject of heavy criticism. The review found that only one quarter of HMRC staff, compared with 61% of senior civil servants, were proud to work for the department. Perhaps senior civil servants are not the best comparator for HMRC staff, but 25% satisfaction is not very impressive. The survey also found that only 11% of staff—the hon. Member for Chichester said 12%; I am prepared to meet him halfway and say 11.5%—and 17% of senior civil servants felt that change was well managed in HMRC.

I worry that the combination of low staff morale, which the Government inherited but are contributing to, and further funding cuts might be a perfect storm that leads to more problems at HMRC. After all, if we think about it for a moment, we find that enforcing the payment of tax is not necessarily an easy job. No one likes paying tax, and HMRC staff—disproportionately, I suspect—deal with people who are particularly unhappy about the tax return with which they have been presented.

Staff in my constituency would have been greatly reassured and better able to serve the public if HMRC and the Government had worked together sooner to develop an implementation plan for cost savings, so anything that could be done to reduce the anxiety that they have felt for a reasonably lengthy period would be very welcome. It would reduce the worrying gap between the announcement of cuts and people’s knowledge of where they will fall. Anxiety among staff—particularly given the job that they do—is bound to undermine their effectiveness in serving the taxpayer and the public more widely. Given the importance to our country of effective tax collection, I urge the Government to do everything they can to reduce that anxiety.

My final observation touches on several contributions to the debate. As I have suggested, tax collection is not always an easy or, at times, pleasant job. People do not generally like paying tax, and in a profession such as tax collection, esprit de corps—a sense of public service and duty—is especially important. Previous Governments were not blameless in this respect, but this Government must be careful that, in the quest for short-term savings, they do not further damage the thread of professionalism, duty and pride in the job, without which an efficient tax collection system is unlikely to be possible.

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

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right about the importance of morale at HMRC. As we discovered from testimony to the Treasury Committee, which Members discussed earlier, HMRC has gone from being a flagship Government department to almost dysfunctional on some metrics. One area in which it is dysfunctional is morale. Does he share my view that the nature of the cuts that have been made over the past decade and the very poorly handled merger with Customs and Excise have been most to blame for the crisis of morale at HMRC and the decline in its reputation?

[Gregg McClymont]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his observations. I was very interested in what the hon. Member for Chichester said about the merger. I come to that subject with little background knowledge, and I intend to do some reading on it, because at face value it seems to be a plausible reason for some of the problems that HMRC now faces.

[Gregg McClymont]

My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. If we do indeed have an organisation that is dysfunctional, to use the hon. Gentleman’s term, there is clearly a question about whether the way to approach managing such an organisation is to engage in severe cutbacks.

[Jesse Norman]

I have a simple point of information for the House, which is that my constituency is Hereford and South Herefordshire, not Hertfordshire. Although Hertfordshire is undoubtedly a place of great glories—sadly, with due deference to my hon. Friend the Exchequer Secretary, only very slightly secondary to the qualities of my own constituency—the two should certainly not be confused.

[Gregg McClymont]

Now that the hon. Gentleman has provided that important point of information, I will conclude with a final observation that pertains to his previous intervention and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Mr Love).

Only with a cadre of well-paid, trained and skilled staff who enjoy a status commensurate with the important job they do will a more effective, efficient and productive HMRC become possible, and those staff have to be the foundation stone as we go forward through this decade. Does the Minister think we have that cadre as things stand?

--- Later in debate ---

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

I speak in this important debate both as a member of the Treasury Committee and on behalf of my constituents.

We have heard about the prestige of the Revenue historically, and about the effects of the merger with Customs and Excise, and the hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) just talked about its transformation into a benefits agency, and made a good point on that.

Although there has been a lot of discussion of costs, this problem is not just about cost cutting. It is also about a failed model of public service delivery, which is at least as important. To illustrate that, let me describe the situation we have found in Hereford. The tax office in Hereford was closed a couple of years ago with the loss of 90 skilled jobs, despite local protests, with which I was closely involved. We are talking about a high-quality employer in a county that is not a high-wage part of the country. That was a grievous loss to the local economy, and in my view a rather unnecessary one, as I will argue.

My second point concerns a local company—I will not name it—working in the area of defence, a small enterprise exporting very successfully. That business presented some concerns about the coding of its exports to the Revenue, and was then appalled to have HMRC take up residence, conducting a kind of fishing expedition through its accounts, which resulted in the Revenue demanding a substantial payment for tax allegedly not received. In turn, that involved huge amounts of time being taken on, and attention being paid to, dealing with this complaint against a very small but rather successful business.

These two points illustrate the effect of the transfer of compliance costs, which has been widely noted, from the Revenue to the people and SMEs it deals with. We have had the loss of a local presence through the tax office, and its replacement by a call-centre mentality that is often incompetent and impossible for the public to deal with.

[Guto Bebb]

On IT systems and call centres, is my hon. Friend aware that the current system is not compliant with HMRC’s own Welsh language policy and is also contrary to the Welsh Language Act 1993? As a result, I have constituents who are unable to deal with the tax authorities through the medium of their own language because the offices have been closed, or because the call centre or online service is not available through the medium of Welsh.

[Jesse Norman]

I was not aware of that and I thank my hon. Friend for his remark. Of course, historically, Welsh speakers on the other side of the border were very welcome to come to Hereford to have these issues solved, but unfortunately that option does not exist now.

The point is that it is not simply an issue of the cost cutting that has taken place over the past 10 years; the whole model of public service delivery has relocated that service away from local people and back to call centres, as we have heard. That has happened under the influence of a mentality bred by the consulting firms. In particular, one picks out McKinsey, which did a substantial piece of work for HMRC some time ago. This, I am afraid, has been the method by which this mistaken conception of public service delivery has been promulgated. Services, instead of being brought closer to people, have been removed from them. A use of technology that could have assisted the ordinary man and woman and small businesses in dealing with their tax affairs has ended up impeding them, and that has been a terrible and costly shame.

I would direct the current management of HMRC to what systems theory calls “failure demand”. Failure demand is not the cost of delivering a service, but the cost on the rest of the system when people fail to deliver a service. Failure demand in the Revenue has gone through the roof in the last decade, and the statistic we have heard about the length of time people spend on the telephone dealing with Revenue and Customs is a very precise quantification of this increase in failure demand. Essentially, instead of thinking of the costs on the system as a whole, the Revenue has been pushed into pursuing the lowest unit cost, which has encumbered the whole.

There is a parallel in the manufacturing industry. Historically, General Motors ran a production line and if a substandard car was on it, it would be removed from the line and the line was allowed to continue. The result was that these “lemons”, as they were called, built up over time and required a substantial amount of time to fix. However, the system itself never got any better because every time there was a problem, the lemon—the bad car—was removed from the production line. The Toyota approach was entirely different. Every time there was a problem with a car, the entire production line stopped. One can imagine the result: enormous pain for a time, followed by a dramatic improvement in quality and a dramatic fall in costs, because the system was no longer tolerant of failure.

At the moment, for the reasons we have described, HMRC has a system that is massively and very unhappily tolerant of failure. The Government are picking up this mess and will be seeking to make something of it over five years—I hope they will be doing so over 10 years. I encourage them to address not merely the issue of boosting the tax collection rates, but the failed model of public service delivery that underlies the Revenue and so many of our other public services. The Conservative party is committed to improving public services and this is a very good place to start.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

The wind-ups will begin at 6.40 pm.

Oral Answers to Questions

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Tuesday 8th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

It is hard not to point out to the hon. Gentleman that his party supported the patent box when it was in government. It is not just that policy that will support high-tech manufacturing. Our policies of reducing corporation tax year on year rather than having it go up, and of reducing national insurance and getting rid of the worst impacts of the jobs tax that was making it harder for companies to keep people employed, will support growth in the economy. His party simply has no idea how to start making that happen.

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

12. What his policy is on transparency in private finance initiative contracts.

[The Chief Secretary to the Treasury (Danny Alexander)]

The Government are committed to transparency across all areas of public spending, including PFI contracts. All new central Government PFI contracts will be published, and the Treasury website holds PFI statistics that will be updated at the Budget.

[Jesse Norman]

I thank the Chief Secretary for that answer. Last week, the Ministry of Defence announced that it had chosen three PFI projects as pilots for a wider renegotiation strategy in order to generate a rebate for taxpayers. I and many other Members have warmly welcomed that news. Is my right hon. Friend planning to encourage other Departments to reopen their own PFI contracts to generate future savings?

[Danny Alexander]

I am grateful for the question, and I certainly support the work that the MOD is doing. We are actively encouraging Departments and local authorities to scrutinise their PFI contracts for savings. As my hon. Friend knows, the Treasury has published draft guidance to help contract managers identify PFI savings, and a pilot will test the savings measures in the contracts, which will help to scope out possible savings and ensure that other Departments can make the same progress as the MOD.

Bank Bonuses

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

I hope that what people are hearing from us today are serious proposals: to increase lending in our economy, which is very important; to reduce the bonus pool, so that it is not as large as it was under the Labour Government; and to increase the contribution to communities in the way that we all want to see. That is what we are seeking to agree with the banks. As I say, there is absolutely no proposal to the contrary from the Labour party, which actually created this mess, and feathered the nests of the banks, while it was in office.

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

Does the Chancellor share my view that one reason why there was no bank levy under the Labour Government was because, in Lord Mandelson’s words, they were

“intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich”?

[Mr Osborne]

That was one of the things that Labour Cabinet Ministers said at the time—and indeed, quite a few of them have lived up to it since leaving office.

Oral Answers to Questions

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Tuesday 21st December 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hoban]

The Government are totally united about the fact that we want banks to play their full role in the economic recovery by lending to businesses and recognising their wider social responsibilities.

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

May I remind the House that no hospital PFI contract was signed under the—[Interruption.]

[Mr Speaker]

Order. The hon. Gentleman is to resume his seat. He has come in on the wrong question I am afraid; we are talking about bank bonuses.

Autumn Forecast

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Monday 29th November 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

I do of course think the spending review was fair, but as I said at the time—[Interruption.] If the Opposition would actually produce a spending review, perhaps we could compare the two—but they do not want to do that.

The point I was making to the hon. Lady is that I said at the time of the Budget and the spending review that I was making a conscious decision to seek further welfare reform to try to reduce the rapidly escalating costs of the welfare state. That was a challenge that anyone doing my job would face, and I said that if we were able to find further welfare reforms, we would be able to reduce the cuts in Departments, and that is exactly what we were able to do.

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

May I congratulate the Office for Budgetary Responsibility on a thoroughly transparent, comprehensive and technically excellent report? It marks a first in this country. Can the Chancellor give us an assessment of any remaining threats he sees to financial stability from the eurozone countries?

[Mr Osborne]

There is of course concern about the high deficits, particularly in the eurozone. Let us hope that the action taken yesterday to stabilise Ireland, and also the clarification that eurozone Ministers offered about the future permanent bail-out mechanism and the involvement of private sector creditors in that, will help to achieve stability. That is certainly what the intention was yesterday.

Comprehensive Spending Review

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Mr Osborne]

As I mentioned early in my speech, we have provided some additional resources for the voluntary sector through the transition fund. As for the local government settlement, I said that it was challenging. The right hon. Lady, who used to be a member of the Cabinet, is well aware that some difficult decisions were required to reduce the deficit. If there are other areas of Government spending that she would have preferred me to cut more, she can tell me what they are, but she did not volunteer any in her question.

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

May I say, on behalf of not merely the people of Herefordshire but people in rural counties everywhere, how thrilled I am about the new super-fast broadband pilot? That is magnificent news. May I also ask the Chancellor whether it made a difference that the previous fundamental savings review had not been implemented when he came to see the problem face to face?

[Mr Osborne]

It did make a difference, and I found in the Treasury absolutely no plans to reduce the budget deficit. They were pencilled into the March Budget, which Labour Members all cheered at the time, but absolutely no plans were put in place.

I am delighted that we have been able to help Herefordshire in this way. It is one of the most rural parts of England, and I think that super-fast broadband is key to the future of the rural economy.

Independent Financial Advisers

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Wednesday 20th October 2010 Westminster Hall

[Harriett Baldwin]

I thank my hon. Friend for that interesting intervention. I shall come to precisely that point in a moment.

The market for financial advice suffers from comparatively low consumer trust. Consumers find it difficult to engage with the financial services industry—banks are not exactly the most popular institutions in the country at the moment. Economists would describe buying financial products as a transaction in which consumers have asymmetric information; in plain English, the buyer knows a lot less about the product than the seller. There is therefore a need for proper independent advice.

Along with banks, IFAs have been guilty of selling certain products because they give a better commission. Like banks, IFAs have been found to have mis-sold private pensions to public sector workers. Like banks, they have mis-sold high-income precipice bonds. Often, they have sold products that simply performed badly or carried high charges. There is no doubt that the industry’s reputation could be improved.

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

My hon. Friend mentioned the Treasury Committee, and it may be of interest to note that I was in the Committee yesterday when it talked about this issue. Interestingly, the response from the Association of Independent Financial Advisers and the Association of Private Client Investment Managers and Stockbrokers was that the retail distribution review, having started with high ambitions and high principles, not only ran four times over cost, but conducted a somewhat ineffective consultation. I put the question whether, in that aspect at least, it had become a bit of a fiasco, and the witnesses concurred, very much to my surprise. My hon. Friend might want to bear that in mind in future discussions.

[Harriett Baldwin]

I thank my hon. Friend and neighbour. He is a distinguished practitioner and member of the Treasury Committee. I am very interested to hear about the evidence yesterday.

We should not underestimate the costs of mis-sales to consumers. The FSA’s cost-benefit analysis assesses the cost to consumers of the pensions mis-selling scandal at £45 million per annum. In reaction to such circumstances, the FSA has spent the past several years consulting on how to address the issues involved. I share its goal of improving consumers’ perception of the industry and access to high-quality investment advice.

--- Later in debate ---

[Harriett Baldwin]

There is an important point to be made about how some of the larger organisations, and indeed some banks and bancassurers, will most readily be able to have their staff trained for the exams. However, that raises the question whether the exams will really test the skills needed by a good financial adviser. In the investment world, experience is valued and the FSA is imposing on the market a one-size-fits-all, prescriptive approach to education, at great cost to consumers, in return for a modest benefit.

I have written to the chief executive of the FSA and to date have received a letter, beginning, “Dear Mr Baldwin”, simply reiterating the FSA’s consultation paper conclusions. I would like to ask the Minister to answer a few questions. The FSA is the independent statutory regulator. However, it is answerable ultimately to the Treasury. Does the Minister believe that it is proportionate in the present case to impose a regulatory burden of £1.7 billion on consumers? Is the Minister concerned that up to 25% of smaller advisers are likely to leave the industry, handing a competitive advantage to banks and bancassurers? Is he convinced that the banks will not be able to find a way to reward employees for pushing certain products? Does he share my concern that the FSA’s own impact assessment suggests that those who get reduced access to advice are likely to be the smaller, poorer consumers in more remote areas?

Does the Minister think that there might be a more proportionate way for the FSA to achieve its objectives? For example, IFAs who have passed exams could add the letters of qualification to their business cards. Consumers could then be educated and could choose an unqualified adviser if they preferred, but would come to know over time that there was a brand to the qualification.

[Jesse Norman]

There is also a simple solution for firms of more than one person, which is that the senior member can sign off on the work or qualification of the person who has not received formal accreditation. That allows for the sharing of liability, the preservation of standards within the firm and the guarantee of good quality to the customer.

[Harriett Baldwin]

I thank my hon. Friend for that helpful suggestion.

I would also like to ask the Minister how changing from commissions, which are currently exempt from VAT, to advice, which will attract VAT, will not add a further cost for consumers.

Oral Answers to Questions

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Tuesday 12th October 2010 Commons Chamber

[Danny Alexander]

I join the hon. Gentleman in paying tribute to the work of the citizens advice bureaux. In constituencies across the country they play an invaluable role in advising people and helping them through difficult times. We will make spending announcements on 20 October, but I have had conversations with the citizens advice bureaux about some of the issues affecting them. Those issues will also affect other organisations in the community and voluntary sector, and the Government take that very seriously.

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

Does the Chancellor share my view that an economic policy that does not engage with cutting the deficit at all, and which has £30 billion of additional spending requirements, is no economic policy?

Equitable Life (Payments) Bill

Jesse Norman Excerpts

Tuesday 14th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Timms]

I am afraid that my hon. Friend is absolutely right. We got some process today, and that is it.

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

Does the House share my sense of bewilderment that the right hon. Gentleman should be asking us to apologise for five months of action, when he has done nothing for 10 years? Can he give us a quantification of the cost to Equitable Life policyholders of the past five years of Labour’s failed activity, given that a deal could have been done in 2004 but was not?

[Stephen Timms]

My advice to the hon. Gentleman and the great majority of his hon. Friends is turn his fire on those on his own Front Bench and ask them to deliver the pledge that so many of them signed up to. At the moment, we are heading towards the prospect of that not being delivered.

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.