Budget Resolutions and Economic Situation

John Redwood Excerpts

Wednesday 16th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Tyrie]

I am not going to put the right hon. Gentleman under any pressure.

The Chancellor deserves a great deal of credit for the recovery, and I have said so before; so does the Prime Minister—he has just slipped out of the Chamber—who has backed the Chancellor, I think, for the most part. The last six years have been extremely difficult at times, and it is a defining achievement for the Government that they have led the country out of the worst crisis in modern history and that they are now stabilising the public finances, which looked, and indeed were, completely out of control in 2010. We should not forget the scale of the challenge that beset the then coalition Government.

The Chancellor has talked about storm clouds gathering. I think he called it a “cocktail of risks”, coming particularly from abroad. He is certainly right about that. Emerging markets are slowing down, capital markets are faltering and the eurozone is edging back towards a serious crisis. If all that is sustained, the UK economy is going to take a hit. Of course, as the Office for Budget Responsibility has pointed out, the uncertainty in the short term about the EU referendum will not help either. We have seen all that reflected in the OBR’s forecasts, particularly on productivity. The Chancellor is right to be extremely cautious.

If I get time, I will say something briefly about the fiscal rules, and their merits or otherwise; there are some problems with the fiscal rules. I will also say whether fiscal policy should be so frequently adjusted to take account of forecasts as a consequence. I might say something, if I get time, about the way in which Budget measures are advertised so far in advance, which I am not sure is at all helpful.

First, I want to answer one central criticism of the recovery that is now under way—we did not hear so much of that from the Leader of the Opposition, although there were hints of it from time to time—and that is the assertion that the UK is in the grip of an unsustainable debt-driven, consumption-led recovery. Frankly, the statistics do not support that. Of course, one might say that the statistics are not worth much, because they have come from the Office for National Statistics and other sources, and we have discovered that they are of very little merit. Sir Charlie Bean is trying to improve statistics. They are the only figures we have got, however, and on the basis of the figures we have got, that claim, which is certainly widely made, does not hold up.

Investment has contributed a third of the total growth since the depths of the recession in the middle of 2009, despite accounting for only one seventh of GDP in recent years; that is the figure for the past five years. Debt as a proportion of household income has remained well below crisis levels, and recently productivity and real wage growth, which are the hallmarks of a sustainable recovery, are also showing signs of a pick up—something that the Chancellor did not emphasise in his speech—so I do not think that that argument holds up. Even if it were true that the recovery was very uneven as a consequence, that is what I would expect. The bigger the shock—this was a very big shock, the biggest in modern economic history—the more uneven the recovery is likely to be. Growth returns only a result of a fundamental reallocation of capital after a major crisis and more efficient use of that capital in the places to which it goes.

That process, this time, has been made particularly difficult by a profound weakness of the banking system. Firms, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, appear unable to obtain the capital they need to invest and grow even now. Again, that is something that the Chancellor did not emphasise. Although it is true that the average rate of interest for new advances is not very high—around 4%—the total stock of outstanding loans to SMEs tells its own story. It is falling, and has been falling pretty steadily for several years, even though the economy is recovering. That suggests that SMEs are not able, perhaps because of some form of rationing, to get the money that they need to grow and to sustain economic activity. That is a question that we need to come back to in the context of banking reform. Above all, we need desperately to get much more banking competition into the SME market and into the retail banking market.

I said that I would query the fiscal rules, and I am going to do so, as indeed has the Treasury Committee in an earlier report. The Chancellor was able to show a good deal of flexibility when it mattered in the last Parliament. His fiscal rules provided him with a good deal of leeway to adjust policy in response to the euro crisis, which was a heck of a shock to adjust to. He recently imposed three new restrictions on himself. First, there is this new surplus rule. Then there is the ring-fencing of three quarters of public spending. Now we also have the tax lock, which prevents rises in VAT, national insurance and income tax, which collectively account for three quarters of tax revenue.

Making fiscal rules all began with the efforts of Tony Blair and the former right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath to restore credibility to Labour’s economic policy in the 1990s. Since 1997—I have taken a look at the fiscal rules and if somebody wants me to go through them all, I will, but that will only delay the House—I have worked out that we have had six, so the average life of those fiscal rules has been three and a half years. I am afraid that the record of this Government and the coalition Government is no better than that of their predecessors; actually, it is somewhat worse. There is some merit in the Government’s giving guidance to markets and the public about their intentions, particularly their long-term and strategic intentions, but the rules have been presented, as their names suggest, as something far more permanent. They are called guarantees, rules, mandates, charters or pledges. Of course, as each one has been broken, it has not done much for the quality of politics and political discourse, and it has not done anything for economic credibility. The Government’s fiscal credibility does not derive from the rules or the mandates; it comes from the fact that they have tackled the deficit and have got it down from 10% to about 3% or a bit more.

Parties on both sides of the House now have fiscal rules. The new Labour shadow Chancellor—I do not think he is new Labour himself, but he is the recently appointed shadow Chancellor—has recently come up with one of his own. Both parties are at it, but I do not think the rules of either of them are offering much.

[John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)]

Is not one of the problems faced by any Government the fact that the so-called independent forecasts by the OBR and the Bank of England are always wrong and that they are always changing them? Those forecasts can have more of an impact on the Budget than common-sense judgments about where the economy is going, because we are always dealing with the errors of the OBR.

[Mr Tyrie]

That is exactly the point I was coming on to make. We have just seen that the Chancellor has been forced to adjust his short-term policy to take account of what the OBR is now saying. He has altered his plans of only four months ago, and so long as the rule remains in place, he will have to do so again after the next fiscal event. That is mainly why the Treasury Committee concluded—the Leader of the Opposition did not give the whole quote—that it was

“not convinced that the surplus rule is credible in its current form.”

There is merit in something that can give some guidance, but it must be something less than one of these cast-iron rules that turn out to be so brittle they get smashed the first time there is a problem.

There are the public expenditure rules. On public expenditure, the Government have ring-fenced about three quarters of public spending—health, schools, defence, international aid, pensions and child benefit. That is a heck of a lot. I will give an illustration of the effect of doing that. The Chancellor said that he needs to find only 50p in every £100, which I think he said will come mainly from value-for-money savings across the public spending framework. In fact, of course, three quarters of that framework is ring-fenced, so he really needs to get £2 in every £100 from the quarter from which he can raise it.

Then there is the tax rule. It says that the Government are committed, in law, not to increase VAT, income tax or national insurance contributions, which collectively amount to three quarters of Government revenue. I voted for that piece of declaratory legislation. I am not very keen on declaratory legislation, but I went through the Lobby for it. I must say, speaking personally—not on behalf of the Treasury Committee—that I would much rather have voted for legislation that prohibited Chancellors from tying their hands behind their backs in such a way, and I would like to limit hypothecation at the same time.

I will not detain the House for very much longer, except to say that the Budget measures will need very careful examination by the Treasury Committee. There is certainly quite a bit to examine, as there usually is every year. As the son of a shopkeeper, I cannot be anything but delighted to hear what has been said about class 2 national insurance contributions and small business rate relief. Although I will take a close look at that, it sounds as though that is exactly what is required. The reduction in corporation tax to 17% should not be underestimated. I would not mind betting that we will get some more revenue from that, quite independently of the anti-avoidance measures that are being pushed through.

The sugar tax has been limited to fizzy drinks and soft drinks. Speaking personally, if we are going to have a tax based on sugar, I wonder whether we should not consider widening that base in the longer run. After all, it is not just the sugar in drinks that is held to be harmful. Whether we always want to define tax bases on health grounds is another matter, but that bridge has been crossed now that such a levy has been introduced.

There are the cuts to the capital gains tax rates, the lifetime ISAs—they look very interesting and are certainly worth examining carefully—and of course the changes to income tax thresholds. There are quite a few other things, but those are the main ones for now. There is a lot for the Treasury Committee to examine with all this. We will get at it in the coming weeks and produce a report for consideration during the passage of the Finance Bill. There are quite a number of colleagues from the Committee in the Chamber at the moment.

We will score all the tax measures against whether they make the tax system simpler or more complex. We will reduce that assessment, on the basis of technical advice from the leading authorities in the field, to a number. Simplification is a mantra: everybody says we must have a simpler tax system, and every year Tolley’s tax guide expands. We must now, much more rigorously, start to create the conditions in which we can reverse that process. One of them is to flag up just how much more complex the tax system is becoming.

We will look carefully at the distributional impact of the measures. I regret that the Chancellor decided to change the basis of the assessment that the Government agreed to produce on the distributional effects. He originally, and very helpfully, published that in 2010, but he changed it in 2015, which I regret. We will look at that issue. Continuity of method, which he agreed to in evidence to us, is absolutely crucial.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stewart Hosie (Dundee East) (SNP)]

As with every Budget, there are some things to welcome. I welcome what the Chancellor said about the European Union. He will not be surprised to get help on that from SNP Members, because we also believe that we are better off in. I also welcome some of what he said about tax evasion and avoidance, and the abolition of class 2 NICs.

When it comes to the self-employed and contractors—people who, in many cases, are taking their first step in forming a new business—I would make the point that the Red Book suggests that there will be £765 million in extra tax due to travel and subsistence changes. It would have been far better to review that regime entirely rather than simply going ahead and doing that.

I welcome the oil and gas changes. The changes to the supplementary charge and petroleum revenue tax are very welcome. I was slightly disappointed by the lack of strategic direction, with no mention of exploration or production allowances, but I am sure discussions are ongoing. Likewise, I welcome the freeze on whisky duty and the freeze on fuel duty, for which we have been calling.

It is one of the small measures, but may I say that we very much welcome the additional money for school sports? I do not know what the Barnett consequentials of that will be, but it provides a useful opportunity for SNP Members to welcome the creation, in the past week, of the 150th school sport hub in Scotland, delivering the necessary additional sport for children.

I have a small point of disagreement with the Chancellor. He prayed in aid the leader of the Scottish branch of the Tory party, to cheers from many Members on his side of the House. It is probably worth noting that, last May, she led the Conservatives to their worst UK election result in 150 years.

The Chancellor rather skipped over his record in the last Parliament on debt, deficit and borrowing. We know he did not meet a single one of his targets. He told us that debt would fall as a share of GDP by 2014-15, that the current account would be in balance this year and that public sector net borrowing would be barely £20 billion. That, of course, did not happen. We warned at the time that debt would not begin to fall as a share of GDP until later, that the current account would not be back in the black until 2017-18, and that public sector net borrowing for this year would be about four times what he promised.

Our judgment is that much of the Chancellor’s failure came about because he strangled the lifeblood from the recovery by cutting too much too quickly, with little or no regard to the consequences—an error he set in stone with the fiscal charter, with its requirement to run a permanent surplus almost irrespective of economic conditions or the effect that cutting more than necessary would have on the prospects for the economy. We have had a very quick look, and we listened to what the Chancellor said, and the current account will not now be back in the black until 2018-19. The targets keep getting pushed back—more broken promises. Borrowing will still be higher in four years’ time than he promised it would be this year. That is the scale of the failure on the key economic metrics. Even in this Parliament, when he has continually been warned about repeating the mistakes of the past, he has done the same today—in many ways with a vengeance.

Capital expenditure is a mixed bag, and I will come on to that. I do not expect the Chancellor to listen to me, but he should listen to the IMF and the OECD. The IMF said that he had done enough to stabilise the Government’s finances—that is questionable—for them to embark on extra investment spending should GDP growth slow. He should take that advice. Only in February, the OECD told him it was revising down its GDP forecast for this year and recommended a commitment to raising public investment, which would boost demand while remaining on a fiscally sustainable path. We would have expected him to listen. We are glad that there is a very modest rise in capital expenditure over the forecast period, but it is actually marked down this year compared with the forecast we got in the autumn statement last winter. That is not consistent with what needs to be done, or with the advice received from others.

It is not all about broken promises on debt, deficit and borrowing. We now have a Chancellor who has done this many times—he has set about replicating the errors he made with his borrowing figures in his trade and export figures for this Parliament. He said previously that he expected to be able to deliver an almost certainly unachievable doubling of exports by 2020, but the OBR told him last year, at the time of the autumn statement, that he would fall short by £350 billion. We looked at the autumn statement, and the impact of net trade on GDP growth will be negative from 2016 through to 2020, and there will be a deficit in the balance of trade current account for the entire period. I am disappointed, because action can be taken. The impact of net trade on GDP growth is no better or worse in every single year of the new forecast period, and the balance of payments current account is actually worse in every single year, even compared with last autumn’s forecast. In the past week or so, we had confirmation of a £92 billion trade deficit and a £125 billion deficit in the trade in goods.

To be fair, those failings are not all the fault of the Chancellor. Some have been embedded in the UK economy for decades, whether on exports, support for innovation and manufacturing, or boosting productivity. They are all inextricably linked. In many ways Labour is the biggest culprit, having lost more than 1 million manufacturing jobs during its time in office—and that was before the recession. But it is the current Government’s failure to address those problems that is really troubling. We would have expected concerted action today on innovation, manufacturing, productivity and work with academia—all the things we are falling behind on internationally, which has led to decline. Manufacturing was 30% of the economy in the 1970s, and today it is 10%; it provided more than 20% of all jobs in the 1980s, and today it is 8%; and it went from more than a quarter of all business investment in the 1990s to barely 15% today.

The Chancellor will argue that some of the tax cuts will allow businesses to keep and invest more of their own money, and I hope that is true, but if he were serious, we should have seen an increase in the budget of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. Instead, we have seen the Department’s budget being marked down every single year. We would have seen an announcement on support for innovation, because we know that since 2010 the science budget has been frozen in cash terms, with a real-terms drop of 10%. By 2012, publicly funded science fell to less than 0.5% of GDP, and we can see nothing today that will take us off the bottom of the G8 heap.

[John Redwood]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

--- Later in debate ---

[Stewart Hosie]

In that case, because it is the right hon. Gentleman, I will happily take the intervention.

[John Redwood]

I am very grateful. Is not the British problem not that we lack great universities, great ideas, great innovation, a large number of patents and a lot of start-ups, but a problem of getting smaller businesses to grow sufficiently and become big businesses that can export to France and Germany? How would the hon. Gentleman tackle that problem?

[Stewart Hosie]

That is indeed one of the substantial issues, which is why our Government in Scotland have delivered the small business pledge. In return for assistance from Scottish Government agencies, the pledge requires those businesses to seek out and take export opportunities, and to innovate. We have delivered a £78 million fund for innovation to encourage 1,000 new inventions and to allow 1,200 businesses to liaise and work directly with academia. There are many practical ways to solve the problem that the right hon. Gentleman rightly identifies.

We will have to check the fine print about businesses that want to export, but in the Blue Book in the autumn, UKTI’s budget, after a slight rise for 2016-17, was cut by more than £20 million a year. Between 2018-19 and 2019-20, it will be flatlining in cash terms and falling again in real terms. We need to begin to tackle properly the underlying issue of poor productivity. From our perspective, that means delivering inclusive growth—essentially, a fairer and more equal society. We have seen the numbers, and we understand that it is not enough simply to grow the economy to fund public services. We must squeeze inequality out of the system to get the growth we need in the first place.

The Tories have never believed in that, and Labour failed on it for 13 years, and we have seen some of the mistakes repeated today. In the previous Parliament, discretionary consolidation—the balance of cuts and tax rises—went from a ratio of 4:1 to 9:1. What did we see today? Billions taken from people with disabilities, through changes to the personal independence payment, to fund an above-inflation increase in the 40p threshold. The 40p threshold did need to be addressed—I have said it for years—but to have an above-inflation rise while taking billions from the most disabled people in the country is disgraceful and economically wrong. The UK lost 9% of GDP growth due to rising inequality in the two decades from 1990, and the Chancellor is making the same mistakes again.

Some of the business measures that the Chancellor announced are to be welcomed. It was good that the Chancellor mentioned apprenticeships, but what he did not mention, of course, is that many firms—he should know this by now—already pay a 1.5% levy on payroll to the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board for training. The apprenticeship levy was simply an additional tax on jobs. I had hoped the Chancellor would reflect on the comments made following its introduction last year.

Likewise, the Chancellor told us last year that he was counting on a windfall of about £31 billion from the sale of banking, financial and commercial assets, but the OBR told us last year that it would be £24 billion, and there has been little change since then. Clearly, the Lloyds stock will still be privatised, and the Red Book refers, I think, to other sales, but there was absolutely nothing about an anticipated windfall, so it will be interesting to see whether he intends to sell off the family silver in a way that has gone unannounced today.

The Scottish Government’s ability to re-energise the Scottish economy cannot be hamstrung and hampered by decisions taken here. Before today’s statement, we expected that our discretionary budget this Parliament, taking into account the cuts already imposed, would be about £3.9 billion, or 12.5%, lower in real terms than it was in 2010. No matter what has been said, we expected capital spending to be £600 million lower in real terms than in 2010-11, and, based on the autumn statement, we expected that the departmental expenditure limits—DEL—budget would be increased by about 0.7% in cash terms, or a 1% real-terms reduction. We wait with interest to see what the number crunchers tell us the implications of the Budget will be.

This is all about political choices. We said at the election—and we hold to it—that a very modest, 0.5% real-terms increase in expenditure could have released money not just for investment but to make sure that those on benefits did not fall any further behind. That would have been a sensible, humane and productive thing to do, but the Chancellor and the Government have gone against that one more time. He might be able to sell it to some of his Back Benchers, but he has been unable to sell it in Scotland. I fear that that will continue to be the case.