John Redwood
Main Page: John Redwood (Conservative - Wokingham)
Stewart Hosie
Not at the moment.
It is worth reminding ourselves how we got to where we are today. It is not all the fault of this Chancellor, but the Tory targets on debt, deficit and borrowing that were promised in 2010 simply were not met. I shall demonstrate the scale of the failure. We were told that debt would begin to fall as a share of GDP in 2014-15, that the current account would be in balance the following year, and that public sector net borrowing would be barely £20 billion in that same year. Of course, as many of us warned it would not at the time, that did not happen. Debt will not begin to fall as a share of GDP until 2018-19, the current account will not be in the black until the same year, and public sector net borrowing in 2015-16 was not the barely £20 billion promised, but £72 billion. In short, the Scottish National party argues that the first five years of Tory austerity failed, and we have little confidence that the second five years will be any better.
I turn to the present, and then the future. Last autumn, the Chancellor told us that net debt would peak at 90% of GDP, or £1.84 trillion—that is 12 zeros. Today, he gave us the startling news about the huge progress: it will now peak at £1.83 trillion. Borrowing is down a few hundred million for 2017-18, and the current budget, due to be in surplus by £18.5 billion in 2019-20, has barely changed. The forecasts are as bad as they were promised to be in the autumn and have barely changed from last spring.
What growth there is seems to be driven in large measure by an assessment of increased business investment of around 4% over the next few years. The Office for Budget Responsibility says that there will be
“a 0.1% fall in business investment in 2017, before uncertainty begins to dissipate”.
We are about to have article 50 invoked, followed by a tortuous 18-month to two-year negotiation, and the OBR and the Treasury are telling us that the uncertainty will dissipate sometime at the back end of this year. That almost beggars belief.
John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
Can the hon. Gentleman explain why he and his party thought before and immediately after the referendum that there would be a sharp slowdown or recession this winter? Were they not completely wrong then, and are they not wrong now about article 50?
Stewart Hosie
The right hon. Gentleman is completely wrong. I can say with absolute certainty that there was never, ever a threat of an immediate collapse. Indeed, I am on record as saying there would be no problem in week one, month one or year one, or even in year two or year three, which gets us to just beyond the negotiation. The danger was always the long-term risk of decreases in foreign direct investment and trade, and of loss of GDP from reduced migration, to which I shall turn because the Chancellor did not.
Much of the previous failure came about because the last Tory Government strangled the lifeblood from recovery by cutting too much or too quickly, with little or no regard to the consequences. That error was set in stone by the old fiscal charter and its requirement to run a permanent surplus quickly, almost irrespective of the economic conditions. The new fiscal charter, which was not really given a look-in today, is certainly more flexible than the last one, but it still targets a surplus early in the next Parliament. The numbers and the timescale look precarious. The forecasts for a current account surplus are tiny, not even reaching 1.5% of GDP in this Parliament. If there is any external shock or any capital flight, if we suffer more devaluation, which is quite likely, or if the negotiations go badly, the figures could fall apart very quickly indeed.
These numbers are being delivered before the full impact of a hard Tory Brexit are felt. We cannot even assess properly what the consequences of that will be, because the OBR tells us
“there is no meaningful basis for predicting the precise end-point of the negotiations as a basis for our forecast.”
That is a central assumption that pretends Brexit does not exist—a ridiculous thing to do with the invocation of article 50 looming.
The OBR’s central forecast is in rather stark contrast to what we already know. The Treasury had reported previously that the UK could lose up to £66 billion from a hard Brexit, and that GDP could fall by almost 10% if the UK reverted to WTO rules, which echoes what the Chair of the Treasury Committee said. Other assessments mirror that. The London School of Economics says:
“In the long run, reduced trade lowers productivity.”
That is a huge problem for the UK. It went on to say:
“That increases the cost of Brexit to a loss of between 6.5% and 9.5% of GDP.”
It puts a range of figures on that of between £4,500 and £6,500 per household.
Last year’s PricewaterhouseCoopers report suggested that employment could fall by 600,000. The figures for Scotland produced by the Fraser of Allander Institute suggest that a hard Tory Brexit could result in 80,000 lost Scottish jobs and a drop in wages averaging £2,000 in a decade. If we add to that the report by senior executives in the FTSE 500 saying that Brexit is already having a negative impact on business, and the British Chambers of Commerce reporting that half the businesses surveyed have already seen a hit to margins due to devaluation, we can see the scale of the problem. What we should have seen today is mitigation to match that.
To be fair to the Chancellor, he did move a little last autumn with announcements of additional support for capital investment and research and development. Today, he reiterated some of the R and D statements and put some flesh on the bone of other investment, no doubt taking his cue from the IMF, which had said previously that the Treasury had done enough to stabilise finances for the Government to embark on extra investment spending. However, the figures from last year’s autumn statement show public sector net investment falling in 2017-18 to 2018-19 and not recovering again until we are in the next Parliament. The figures today for public sector gross investment show them falling this coming year, 2017-18, to the forecast made only three and a half months ago. The money should be spent now to mitigate that rather than waiting for the OBR to say that the damage has been done.
However, it is not all about broken promises on debt, deficit and borrowing. It is not even about repeating the mistakes of the past on investment. We are now in such uncertain times that, to protect jobs and the current account, trade should be front and centre, but little was said about that today. The Red Book tells us already that the current account is in negative territory for the entire forecast period. The impact of net trade will be zero or a drag on GDP growth for almost every year in the forecast period. That is after an average 15% devaluation in sterling since the EU referendum.
John Redwood (Wokingham) (Con)
I draw the House’s attention to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.
The good news is in the forecasts. I am delighted that the Government have gone back to the forecasts they put to us in March 2016, when they rightly said that the UK economy would grow by 2% in 2016, and by little over 2% in 2017. I welcomed those forecasts at the time and held to them throughout the past year. I am delighted that the Treasury has now largely backed those more sensible forecasts.
However, we need to ask why the Treasury, the Office for Budget Responsibility, the Bank of England and many other independent forecasters got the forecasts so comprehensively wrong in the summer of 2016, and why the autumn statement forecasts were still so wrong at the end of last year. I wonder whether we need some efficiency improvements in their economic forecasting departments. Do we really need all those forecasters in the OBR, the Treasury and the Bank of England, if they are going to get it so comprehensively wrong and make the Chancellor’s job so difficult? He is trying to chart a consistent and stable course through a set of forecasts that are rather like a wild ride to some kind of nightmare world, only to discover that there is no nightmare but rather a good outlook.
Alison McGovern (Wirral South) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman says that we ought to get rid of forecasters in the OBR and the Bank of England if they get the forecasts wrong. Plenty of modellers and forecasters in the City of London got their forecasts wrong before the crash in 2008, but I am sure he does not believe that we should end the banking trade in the City of London.
John Redwood
I do not think that the hon. Lady was listening to what I said. I asked whether we have too many of them, because we do not need quite so many to get it wrong; I think that we could be more economical in getting it wrong, if that is what they persist in doing. Certainly, the official forecasters completely missed the banking crash of 2008-09, which some of us did not miss. Then, of course, they got the Brexit impact completely wrong. The Scottish National party is redefining what it believed at the time of the remain campaign. I remember quite clearly it supporting a campaign that said, in terms, that those official forecasts were right—that confidence would be damaged, and therefore consumer expenditure would fall, whereas it has actually gone up very strongly. It said that investment would collapse, but it did not, because the demand was there, and companies need to meet it.
George Kerevan
I clearly remember being in the Treasury Committee when we interviewed the Chancellor, and clearly remember holding him to account for his bogus forecasts, which were clearly over the top, clearly bound to turn people off and clearly led to the wrong result on 23 June.
John Redwood
I am delighted that the hon. Gentleman shared my scepticism. I just wish that he had said rather more at the time when we were fighting the referendum campaign, because I do not remember him being on my side or making similarly helpful comments before people went to vote.
Mr Prisk
One of the difficulties I found when I was Minister with responsibility for construction was that statistics from the Office for National Statistics are often incomplete and based on only partial information. Does my right hon. Friend agree that if forecasts were more infrequent, we might get the numbers right more often?
John Redwood
That might be worth looking at. We need to consider why the forecasts went so comprehensively wrong on this occasion. We also need to probe further why they went so wrong in 2007-08, when they disrupted the world economy in the west. They disrupted the Labour Government very dramatically, because there was absolutely no foresight about the consequences of the actions they were taking over the banking system, first allowing it to expand too fast and then collapsing it far too quickly, with awful consequences, as we know. I am delighted that I can fully support the Government’s latest forecasts, because they are in line with where I have been throughout.
That brings me neatly to the monetary situation. The Government need to recognise that there is a new move afoot. We will probably see an interest rate rise in the United States of America next week, and we might see two or three rises of 25 basis points over the course of this year, because it recognises that its recovery is sufficiently advanced. There is quite a bit more inflation in the American system, and it needs to start to normalise interest rates a little more. We might even hear from the European Central Bank tomorrow that it is no longer thinking of cutting rates further; they are already negative. It might need to think in due course about tapering its rather generous quantitative easing programme.
We are moving into a world where interest rates tend to go upwards, rather than going downwards or staying stable. If we are too slow in responding to that mood, we will find undue pressure on the pound. I do not think that has anything to do with Brexit; I think it is to do with interest rate differentials. The pound started to fall away in the summer of 2015, and most of the devaluation we have seen to date actually took place by April last year, before the vote, but there has been more pressure in recent weeks. When people look at these interest rate differentials, they will say, “Why don’t I hold my money in dollars? Not only will I immediately get a pick-up in interest, but I think there will be further rate rises in America.” We need to factor that in. That is why I welcome the Government’s decision to increase public spending in certain areas. As a constituency MP, I want more money spent on social care. I represent a high-cost area of the country, where the shoe is pinching and there are more people needing that assistance. The Government were right to make a sensible contribution, and I look forward to seeing the details.
John Redwood
I am running out of time, so I cannot take any more interventions.
I welcome the decision to have more money for schools and the NHS, because there, too, my area has been poorly funded for many years. We are looking forward to getting a much better settlement for our schools under fairer funding, and I hope that there will be something for our schools as a result of the Chancellor’s sensible decision to make some increases. I think that colleagues will generally welcome the Government’s attention to schools, the NHS and social care funding. I hope that the rate relief fund will be generous, because I represent an area where there are likely to be substantial increases in the rates, but where businesses are not necessarily generating the extra turnover that makes it easy to pay those sharp increases. We particularly need to look after small and growing businesses. I hope that the fund will be well targeted and will deal with what will otherwise be a series of tough, hard cases.
I welcome the extra spending and relief on tax, because I am not as worried as some about the level of UK debt. We need to remember that the figures the Government are giving us are for the gross debt. They are saying that the debt, at 86% of GDP, is high and needs to be brought down, but of course quite a bit of that debt is owned by the Bank of England on our behalf, so we owe the money to ourselves. The adjusted figure is about 65%, which is a perfectly reasonable level, particularly at a time of very low interest rates. Whatever happens with advanced country monetary policies, we all think that interest rates will remain abnormally low for quite a long period of time—well below the averages we were used to before the banking crash.
This is not a bad time for the state to borrow, particularly if it is investing in projects that we need and that may have some return. We definitely need better transport and strengthened broadband, much of which can be done by private finance. We also need better flood control and, at the same time, more water reserves for the fast-growing areas of the country. We need a lot of extra housing, which brings with it the need for more provision of schools and hospitals.
If we are to carry on growing at something like the rate at which we have done in recent years, we have to accept that there is a backlog of infrastructure requirements—everything from roads to water supply, through to getting our broadband up to speed and sufficient in capacity. I want as much of that as possible to be financed in the private sector, and a lot can and will be, but the Government have an important role in all these areas. They have to offer licences and organise planning permissions. They may need to pump-prime. Parts of the networks may not be financially viable without Government money. That is certainly true of our road system, because we have a system that is free at the point of use, owned by the state in all its manifestations. As we need better roads, Her Majesty’s Government clearly need to invest a decent amount in roads.
I note that the Budget was mercifully short of measures on the tax side, although I am always in favour of measures that cut taxes, rather than increase them, and I would have welcomed rather more of those. The Chancellor understandably wishes to go to having one Budget a year, in the autumn. We look forward to a Budget that deals with taxation in the autumn. He has set out a number of ideas for consultation, or perhaps pre-announcements; I trust that there might be some modification to those by the time we get to the proper Budget in the autumn. I urge him to understand just how crucial flexibility is to our economy, and that flexibility comes from having so much, and a growing volume of, self-employment. We need to ensure that it is as easy as possible to get into self-employment, and that it is as worthwhile as possible when people are successful.
I always think it is a good idea to try to confine taxes, and certainly tax rises, to things that we do not approve of very much. We have quite a number of sin taxes, which are rather easier to sell to the public. We should not go out of our way to tax work, enterprise and success. I know we have to do some of that, because we need a lot of revenue for the range of public services we offer, but our taxes on those things are quite high enough. We might actually find that we raised more revenue from more work and more enterprise if the rates were lower, because there is definitely a beneficial effect if we can get our rates to a competitive level worldwide. We need to understand that other countries around the world are getting the idea of cutting tax rates. The new President of the United States of America is working with Republicans on the hill on a major set of tax proposals that could cut American corporate tax rates and income tax rates dramatically, which would give America an important competitive advantage and make it a much more attractive place for talent and inward investment. We need to bear that in mind as we go into our autumn Budget cycle here, because I want the UK to be the most competitive major economy in the world.
My last point, in response to the previous speaker from the Scottish National party, the hon. Member for Dundee East (Stewart Hosie), is that he should not start painting this picture of misery and collapse in three years’ time, given that there was no collapse immediately after the vote. Were we to end up on World Trade Organisation terms, we would collect £12 billion in tariff revenue, which we could give back to businesses and consumers here; other countries would collect only £5 billion in tariff revenue from our exports to them, so we would be better off financially in that transaction. We would also be better off because if countries placed large tariffs on food exports to us, which would be an extraordinary type of self-harm on their part, we would presumably substitute a lot of imported food from cheaper parts of the world.
Rachel Reeves (Leeds West) (Lab)
The Chancellor spoke today about his determination to tackle the dangers lurking in the small print of contracts, so let us look at the small print of the Chancellor’s Budget. Inflation is up, wages are stagnating, household debt is rising, and the NHS and social care system are on their knees. Social care has been cut by £4.6 billion in the past five years. A £2 billion increase was announced today, but that is not enough to deal with an ageing population and the huge cuts faced by local authorities.
The issue of Europe is not even in the small print of the Budget; there was not a single mention by the Chancellor of the European Union or the negotiations that we presume will begin at the end of this month. There is increasing concern that a hard Tory Brexit, in which we fall back on WTO rules and tariffs, will further harm our exports and inward investment, yet there was nothing today to assure businesses and investors that we will have a system that works for them in the years ahead.
Today is International Women’s Day, but there is very little in the Budget that does anything at all to help women. It is women who have borne 86% of the cuts—benefit cuts and cuts to in-work benefits—and tax rises over the past few years. Some £80 billion a year has been taken out of the pockets of women over the past seven years under this Tory-led Government, yet the Budget does nothing to reverse that trend.
When it comes to household debt, the figures are startling. The whole forecast is dependent on consumers continuing to spend, but that consumption is based on consumers continuing to rack up the debts. Our savings ratio has been falling since 2010, and is now at a record low. Unsecured debt went up by 10% last year. The household debt to income ratio is now at 145%, up 6% in just one year.
John Redwood
Is not it a good thing if a young person with a reasonable job takes out a mortgage? Is not it sensible to borrow?
Rachel Reeves
Unsecured debt, as the right hon. Gentleman knows, grew by 10% last year. That is not secured against anything solid at all. The household income ratio, which is back to being close to the levels of 2008, should sow seeds of doubt in all our minds about the sustainability of our economy. I am concerned about the ability of consumers to carry on bearing this burden. To do so, they will have to increase their debts or have real wage increases, but this Budget sees real wage growth contract sharply because of the sharp increases in inflation as a result of the depreciation of our currency. This is not an economy that is well placed to withstand the strains and shocks that lie ahead.
My argument today is that this dangerous reliance on borrowing and debt is directly connected to the Government’s failure to put wealth and opportunity in the hands of the many rather than just the few. While those on the Government Front Bench keep saying that they are on the side of ordinary people, they have not shown it in their actions today.
Last week, the Institute for Fiscal Studies reported that we are on course for a rapid rise in inequality over the next five years. The bottom 10% of the earnings distribution—those who already have the least—will see their incomes fall in the next few years, particularly due to cuts to universal credit. Meanwhile, those with the most—the top 10%—will see their take-home pay increase by 10%. That is a direct consequence of the Government’s failure to reverse our economy’s growing reliance on low-paid work and low productivity, with one in five people now paid less than the living wage, and deep cuts to in-work benefits, which make it harder for those families in work to make ends meet. That cannot be right.
However, that is not all. The Government have now ignored two independent court rulings by cutting access to disability benefits for over 160,000 people, which will save them £3.7 billion. There is no mention at all of that in the Budget. Switching people from disability living allowance to personal independence payments has also seen nearly 50,000 people lose their Motability cars because their benefits have been cut under the blatantly unfair changes to the assessment rules. That is not the sort of country I want to live in, and I do not think it is the sort of country our constituents want to live in either. Not only is this a betrayal of the hard-working majority the Government promised to put first, but it shows a callous disregard for the poorest and most vulnerable in all our communities. It is also not the way to build the better balanced and more broad-based economy we need to build for the more turbulent times we are bound to see ahead.
Let me set out a few areas where today’s decisions have been misjudged, and how the Government could have delivered a fairer Budget. First, the Government are going ahead with a £1 billion cut to inheritance tax for the richest people in our country. That money should instead be spent on expanding free childcare for families, particularly those on the lowest incomes. Almost half of this inheritance tax giveaway will go to London and the south-east; in fact, 96 of the top 100 constituencies that will benefit are in London and the south-east. But what about our constituencies in the north of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—in the rest of the UK, which does not benefit by one penny from these cuts in inheritance tax?