The Economy

Jonathan Reynolds Excerpts

Tuesday 11th December 2012 Commons Chamber

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

That is right. Many historians will be needed fully to plumb the depths of the goings-on of that Administration—the level of incompetence, the level of secrecy, the high spending, the culture of fear that prevailed in the Treasury for much of that time. It will need many people to investigate that.

It was always the function of the British Treasury, as my hon. Friend well knows, to have a very conservative approach to public finances. It was always the tradition that we in the British Treasury tried to match expenditure to income.

[Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge and Hyde) (Lab/Co-op)]

I am listening carefully to the hon. Gentleman, but I think his historical facts are a little distorted. There has been some sort of deficit in nearly every year that we have had a Conservative Government since the end of the second world war. If he looks at the period 10 years on from 1996-97, he will see that both the debt and the deficit were lower after 10 years of Labour government. What he is saying is simply not correct.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

I appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s intervention, but if he looks at the deficit and the direction of travel and what happened in the 1980s, he will see that the deficit came down, again after a period of Labour mismanagement, every single year from 1979 to 1989, and that the budget was balanced in 1989. It was only as a consequence of the recession that we went back into deficit, as a Keynesian economist would tell him.

Let us look at what has happened over the past three years. The Government came into office when the eurozone was in crisis and there was a massive run on Greek sovereign bonds. The Chancellor’s approach, quite rightly, was to make the deficit our No. 1 priority. That, in effect, calmed the markets. Opposition Members might scoff at the bond markets, but they are very powerful. It was particularly interesting to note that in the six weeks before the general election British gilts were actually rising in value and yields were falling, because the markets rightly believed that Labour would be turfed out of office. In anticipation of that happy event, and before the quantitative easing, people started buying British gilts.

The Chancellor’s approach to dealing with the deficit is exactly the right one, because it followed the insight that we have to deal with spending. All countries in the western world have to do that. That is what the fiscal cliff debate in America is about, because it understands that spending has to be on the table; the issue is the degree to which revenue should be on the table. It has a mature approach to public spending. It is only the Labour party that lives in this Shangri-La world in which we can carry on spending and borrowing money with abandon and making the crisis even worse.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jonathan Reynolds (Stalybridge and Hyde) (Lab/Co-op)]

May I say what a pleasure it is to follow the maiden speeches by our new colleagues, my hon. Friends the Members for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), for Croydon North (Steve Reed), and for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald)? I think that I speak for everyone on the Opposition Benches when I say that they were superb contributions and that the arrival of six new Labour MPs, in all, has given us a tantalising glimpse of what life will be like in 2015 when Labour again has a parliamentary majority.

There is no doubt that the economy is the defining issue of this Parliament and that the deficit reduction plan is the defining measure by which this Government will be judged. In that context, last week’s autumn statement showed us that it is shocking how far they have fallen short, on the basis of their own yardstick, in terms of the progress they have made so far. In the emergency budget after the election, the Chancellor told us that he would need, first, four and then five years to sort the deficit out. He said that we could not afford to do it any slower and ease the pain, as Labour wanted. He said that it would be painful but it would be worth it. Last week, two and half years in, with hundreds of thousands of people made unemployed and the stripping out of the Army, the police, council services and everything else, he told us: “I need another five years.” He told us that we have almost nothing to show for the pain our constituents have endured so far.

Whether people are supporters of the Chancellor or not, the fact is that every time he comes to the House to report on his progress, he has to tell us that the economy has not grown as he had hoped since the last time he was here; that he is planning, more often than not, to borrow more than the last time he was here; that spending on public services will be cut more than the last time he was here; and that future growth will be less than he expected the last time he was here. Crucially, we now know that without the Treasury’s accounting tricks, borrowing would be higher this year than last year. This is a Chancellor who has failed, but it is our constituents who have to pay the price of that failure.

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

Austerity has wreaked havoc in areas such as Wigan precisely because the public and private sectors are so interdependent. The huge cuts to the public sector have had an appalling impact on the private sector as well. Does my hon. Friend share my disappointment that the Chancellor has refused to acknowledge that and refused to change course, as we have urged him to do? Having listened to the hon. Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax), it seems to me not only that the Government refuse to acknowledge that, but that they simply do not understand it.

[Jonathan Reynolds]

I completely agree. It is self-evident. The economy has grown by just 0.6% in the past two years and this year it has shrunk by 0.1%, with talk of the UK yo-yoing back into recession for the third time as the recovery continues to falter.

Without any significant growth, the Chancellor will fail to meet his own targets. Borrowing is only lower this year because the Chancellor has included on the balance sheet the £3.5 billion from the auction of 4G. That would make sense if the 4G mobile spectrum had indeed been sold for that amount, but the auction has not taken place yet. That means that the Chancellor has balanced the books with money that he simply does not have. If I asked my bank manager to accept that I had paid off a chunk of my mortgage as long as she factored in the sale of my car, but that I had not actually sold it yet, she would laugh at me. We should be no more convinced by the Chancellor’s actions.

Without the addition of the estimated windfall from the 4G auction, borrowing this year would actually be £2 billion higher than last year. Despite the promises that the austerity measures would stabilise the economy, this year the Government will borrow more—£212 billion more—than they had planned. Coalition MPs frequently warn us of the dangers of borrowing too much, but they never seem keen to take their own medicine. The Government’s deficit reduction plan is not working and it is simply mismanagement to pretend otherwise.

Deficit reduction is not the only promise that the Chancellor has broken. As well as telling us that austerity would be the solution, he famously promised that we are all in this together. We are not all in this together. The Government have given a £3 billion handout to the richest people in the country, yet a family with two children where one parent earns a relatively modest income of, for example, £20,000 are the ones who lose out.

Furthermore, the Government’s claim that the 50p tax rate meant that millionaires fled the country does not stand up to scrutiny. A simple look at the figures shows that the overall number of taxpayers remained almost unchanged between 2009-10 and 2010-11. Following the introduction of the 50p rate, there may have been a deterioration in declared incomes above £1 million, but that was without doubt the result of the wealthy forestalling their income from one tax period to another. The Government should have kept the rate for the next tax year to ascertain exactly what it brought in, because, goodness knows, we needed the money.

It is the same unequal story right across the country: it is Labour-run councils, particularly those in the north of the country, that bear the brunt of the cuts. On average, Labour-run authorities have seen their budget cut by £107 per person, which is three times higher than the figure for Conservative town halls. Councils will not receive detailed information for their 2014-15 budgets until later this month, but nationally they know that they will face cuts of £445 million in that financial year. Councils such as Tameside face an anxious wait to see whether that reduction will be applied equally or whether councils such as ours will again have to suffer disproportionately.

The situation in adult social care in particular is of great concern to me. I meet people in my surgeries who are in severe need of help, but simply not enough money is provided for social care in this country to meet that need. I have met people with caring responsibilities for adults and children who have told me of their sheer desperation at the prospect of their respite care being taken away. We need to do something urgently to properly support those people.

On unemployment, in my constituency 10 jobseekers are now chasing every advertised vacancy. A good portion of them are over 50 years old and starting to wonder if they will ever work again. Long-term unemployment is rising across the country and nearly 1 million young people are out of work. That is the principal cause of the Government’s borrowing problems and the OBR forecasts that the claimant count will continue to go up.

The Work programme was the Government’s attempt to get people off welfare and into work, but a successful welfare-to-work programme is not possible if there is no work available. According to the Government’s own statistics, just two out of 100 participants were still in work after six months, which means that the chance of getting a job was higher if people did not take part in the scheme. Members should contrast that with the success of the future jobs fund, run by the previous Government and spearheaded by the former Member of Parliament for Stalybridge and Hyde, James Purnell. Unlike the job-hunting support offered through the Work programme, the future jobs fund provided six months’ real work for every participant. It also had long-lasting results: in Tameside, half of those who took part went on to secure permanent employment. Of course, if we are to cut the deficit, we need to get people back into work—that is vital—but the turnaround is not just about the nation’s finances; it is also about an individual’s pride. I therefore urge the Government to look again at the success of the future jobs fund as they try to move forward from the failure of the Work programme.

For those who want to work, but have been failed by the lack of jobs and the impotence of the Work programme, there was even worse news last week. The Chancellor announced that they will be made poorer in real terms because their benefits will not be increased in line with inflation. That will cause hardship not just for the unemployed, but for a great many people in work. We heard today in Treasury questions that the majority of the people who will be affected are in work.

If that had been done as part of the Chancellor asking us to tighten our belts, it would be one thing, but the autumn statement in its totality represents a net giveaway for the next three financial years. It was not the Chancellor asking for more from the British people. The Chancellor can afford a tax cut for millionaires and a cut in corporation tax, but he asks people who get out of bed and go to work on low wages to pay for it. That is a disgrace.

The autumn statement is proof that the economic policies of the Conservative Government are simply not working. We cannot cut the deficit effectively unless the economy is growing, and the Government are not doing enough to foster economic growth. Today, while we talk about taxes, growth, double dips and triple dips, let us not fall into the trap of thinking that this is a debate purely about numbers; this debate is and should be firmly rooted in the increasing struggles of the people we all represent: the growing number of people who are accessing food banks, those who are choosing between eating and heating, and those who live with the fear that their homes may soon be repossessed. Those people are the economic reality of our country and we owe it to them to run our economy better than we are doing at present.