Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

Debate between John Healey and Greg Mulholland

Wednesday 20th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[John Healey]

It will indeed. This is a result of strong cross-party campaigning by Members including my hon. Friend the Member for Penistone and Stocksbridge (Angela Smith) and me.

I also welcome the Chancellor’s decision to axe the beer duty escalator. I pay particular tribute to the Economic Secretary to the Treasury for his hand in that. In fact, the escalator was introduced in 2008 for a four-year term. It should have ended last year, but instead of ending it, the Chancellor extended it. I am glad that he has seen sense and realised that we have hit the revenue maximisation point at which the tax rate had gone up, but the tax take had started to go down. I welcome that: it will be a boost for the brewing industry, which is a great British industry, and it will be a boost for the pubs, too.

[Greg Mulholland (Leeds North West) (LD)]

I would like to thank the right hon. Gentleman and all the other members of the parliamentary save the pub group for their support in this campaign. I would also like to echo what was said about the Economic Secretary being a Minister who listened—I warmly thank him for that. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that this shows that the Government are listening and realised that the beer duty escalator was damaging investment and growth opportunities? Hopefully, we will see growth coming back to the brewing sector, which will have a knock-on effect for pubs.

[John Healey]

That was exactly the case that I, the hon. Gentleman and others were making—that the escalator was damaging investment, damaging jobs, damaging pubs, damaging the British brewing industry and that it had even started to damage tax revenues. This afternoon’s decision is therefore sensible and welcome.

The right hon. Member for Wokingham made an important point in the middle of his speech, when he said that the problem of tax revenues was at the heart of the Chancellor’s fiscal problem. The right hon. Gentleman acknowledged that it was partly about growth. It certainly is, and I would argue that he underestimates the extent to which it is about growth. The big gap in the Chancellor’s record to date—and, to an extent, the Budget announcements today—remains that we have a growth crisis without having a growth plan.

When the Chancellor first took office nearly three years ago, unemployment was falling, the economy was recovering and we had had growth of 1.9% in the final year of the last Labour Government. That is the baseline from which the Chancellor has now given us four Budgets, four fiscal reports, four economic forecasts—with each one worse than the last. Since his first Budget plan in June 2010, debt is up, borrowing is up, we have lost our triple A credit rating, the economy has flatlined and we have had the first double-dip recession for 40 years.

Five years after the recklessness of bankers brought the global financial system close to collapse and drove a worldwide downturn and three years after this Chancellor took control, our UK gross domestic product is still 3% lower than it was at the start of that global crisis. So, our economy is smaller, weaker, making less, earning less and contributing less in revenues to the public finances. Other major countries such as Germany or the US have made up the ground they lost during that global financial crisis—we have failed.

Green Investment Bank (Leeds)

Debate between John Healey and Greg Mulholland

Monday 14th November 2011 Commons Chamber

[Greg Mulholland]

I thank the hon. Gentleman, my constituency neighbour, for that contribution. He correctly notes that wonderful and groundbreaking work has taken place at Leeds city council, and, as he knows, I am the green champion on Team Leeds, with which Leeds MPs specifically are involved. It is an initiative of the Leeds, North Yorkshire and York chamber of commerce, and I am happy to carry on that work and to do what I can to voice it on behalf of Leeds and all those other areas.

The Leeds city region has three fundamentally important things to offer as the location for the green investment bank: first, its location; secondly, its incredible talent in finance, business and the green economy; and, thirdly, its excellent value in allowing for the bank’s affordable establishment as quickly as possible.

[John Healey (Wentworth and Dearne) (Lab)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Greg Mulholland]

I said that I would take contributions from all hon. Members from the region. The right hon. Gentleman’s constituency is on its southern tip, so as long as he is supportive I will certainly take an intervention from him.

[John Healey]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way and congratulate him on securing the debate. I wanted to add a fourth and a fifth point. Fourthly, Leeds is an established financial services centre; and, fifthly, our region, the Yorkshire region, is ahead of many others when it comes to environmental technologies and industries. Does he accept that even in south Yorkshire we recognise the case for Leeds to be the centre for the green investment bank? It has—unusually, from south Yorkshire—our full support for that move.

[Greg Mulholland]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman very warmly for that contribution. When the Leeds city region team established its bid, one crucial thing was to see whether Sheffield and south Yorkshire would come on board in support. That support is very important, and I hope that the Minister listened to the right hon. Gentleman’s contribution. Of course, having the green investment bank based in Leeds would, indeed, be a bonus for south Yorkshire, as it would for the whole region.

We have excellent transport links in the Leeds city region to the north-west, to Scotland, to the north-east and, of course, to London. However, one thing that people perhaps do not understand is that the Leeds city region is the largest manufacturing centre in the United Kingdom. I do not know whether the Minister is aware of that. Crucially, locating the green investment bank in the Leeds city region would place it closest to some of the UK’s most exciting low-carbon sustainable investment opportunities.

We already have a track record of such projects, including electric transport infrastructure, offshore energy, carbon capture and storage, biomass and renewable energy production. As has already been said, there is also a real commitment to green ideals in the Leeds city region. That comes from the public sector, but it also comes from the private and the third sectors. In April this year, the Leeds city region published a business survey which showed that, in respect of environmental innovation, 47% of businesses in the region reported that they had already taken significant action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. That demonstrates that we are at the forefront of the transition to a low-carbon economy.

As I said to the hon. Member for Colne Valley (Jason McCartney), so much that the green investment bank wants to do and wants to invest in is already happening in the Leeds city region. We have to accept that decarbonising the industrial and manufacturing sectors will be one of the green investment bank’s biggest challenges. Our industrial past has left us with a huge challenge. Yorkshire and Humber as a whole is home to the UK’s largest cluster of industrial CO₂ emissions, equivalent to half the domestic emissions of the UK. Our three coal-fired power stations generate 17% of the UK’s energy alone. Drax power station in the region is already co-firing with biomass in a bid to achieve its aim to generate 12.5% of its electricity in that way. That makes it the largest project of its kind in the world. It has plans for three new dedicated biomass-fired plants, which would together add a further 900 MW to the UK’s energy generation.

The Leeds city region is also at the forefront of the development of carbon capture and storage. The project under construction at Ferrybridge will provide the technical evidence needed to underpin large-scale demonstration plants across Europe. The Leeds city region is also leading the way on the delivery of domestic retrofit. Since the feed-in tariff subsidy began, Leeds has had the second biggest take-up of microgeneration technologies in the UK. It is second only—this will certainly please the right hon. Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey)—to another of Yorkshire’s economic powerhouses: Sheffield.

My hon. Friend the Member for Colne Valley mentioned Kirklees. The Kirklees warm zone scheme is viewed as national best practice in funding and delivering domestic retrofit, and it has reduced fuel poverty in some of the most deprived wards in the country. Building on that experience, the Leeds city region is now establishing a city-wide retrofit programme and is advising the Department of Energy and Climate Change on the deployment of the green deal. And that is just in the Leeds City Region.