Spring Statement

Debate between Karen Buck and Lord Hammond of Runnymede

Wednesday 13th March 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

I very much enjoyed my visit to the University of Gloucestershire and was interested to see the innovative work going on there. The improvement in the public finances, to which my hon. Friend referred, is being driven by increased business tax receipts, partly as a result of the Government’s relentless clampdown on opportunities for tax avoidance and evasion and partly as a result of the very significant increase in employment. Some 3.5 million more people in work is very good news not just for 3.5 million households, but for the Exchequer, the public finances and, ultimately, our public services.

[Ms Karen Buck (Westminster North) (Lab)]

Is it not true that poverty in this country increasingly wears a working face, that we now have the highest ever proportion of families in poverty who are in work, that a family of four with two people working full time on the national minimum wage will be £600 a year worse off by 2020, thanks to the Chancellor’s benefit freeze, and that, because he will not tackle the benefit freeze, including on in-work benefits, families in that condition will see absolutely nothing as a consequence of today’s statement?

[Mr Hammond]

I have already made the point about the unsustainable rise in welfare payments under the previous Labour Government. A 65% real-terms increase in the welfare budget was not sustainable. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) can chunter from the Opposition Front Bench as much as she likes, but it will not make it sustainable. I will tell the hon. Lady what will help her constituents: the £6,500 tax cuts per family for people earning low wages and buying fuel, which Opposition Front Benchers voted against, and the £2,500 increase in the national living wage since 2016 for people working full time on low wages.