Budget Resolutions

Kate Green Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

It is a great pleasure to follow the Secretary of State in today’s debate. Our public services keep the nation going. In the last 18 months, we have relied on them more than ever: on nurses, doctors, NHS and care staff, who have looked after us in the most difficult conditions; on police and the emergency services; on transport staff; and, of course, on teachers, lecturers, school and college leaders, early years, childcare and education support staff, who have kept children safe and learning. It is because of their dedication and the importance of the services that they provide that we needed a serious plan in this Budget to rebuild the services that the Government have cut to the bone in the last 10 years, and a plan to remake Britain. Instead, we got a high-tax, low-growth Budget that hits working people with a £3,000 hike in their tax bills; a Budget that did nothing to reduce living costs, tackle soaring energy bills or support working families this winter; and a Budget that failed to address the deep-rooted pressures on the public services on which we all rely.

Over the 74 years of its existence, the NHS has been a source of huge pride to this country. However, under the Conservative party, life expectancy among the poorest has fallen and health inequalities have widened, so measures to tackle that state of affairs were very much needed. Instead, we got the Chancellor pretending that a new wing or new unit somehow counts as a new hospital. We got a sticking plaster for social care, with local authorities having to levy their residents to pay for it. Incredibly, after the 18 months we have all been through, the Government failed to prioritise public health, which has suffered a 24% cut in real terms since 2015-16.

[Emma Hardy]

In the Treasury Committee yesterday, we heard evidence from the Office for Budget Responsibility, which predicts that 95% of councils will raise their precept to the maximum to cover social care—another thing that will have an impact on the cost of living. The letter that I quoted from earlier, which was written to the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care not by me, but by the leader of Conservative-led East Riding of Yorkshire Council, says that adult social care is in crisis.

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. The levy to fund social care is one more tax that will hit hard-pressed families in the spring and will do nothing about the deep-seated need to address the social care crisis and the increasing pressure from an ageing demographic—it will not even touch the sides.

[Jacob Young (Redcar) (Con)]

Is it not the case that the Labour party still has no plan for social care? When we put forward a plan only a few weeks ago, Labour Members voted against it.

[Kate Green]

The hon. Member may not remember the Dilnot plan, which had cross-party support until Conservative Members torpedoed it. He may not have read the five principles that Labour has set out to underpin our approach to social care, including preventive investment to keep people at home and living independently for as long as possible, as we all want to. We have a plan that would invest in the workforce. It is not enough just to wish for better social care; the people have to be there to deliver it. That is Labour’s plan, and if the hon. Member would like more details, I am very happy to send them to him.

Despite 1.6 million people waiting for treatment, there was no guarantee in last week’s Budget that mental health will receive its fair share of NHS funding. Health stakeholders were most critical of the lack of a workforce strategy or a multi-year funding settlement to support it. We cannot deliver world-class healthcare if we do not invest in recruitment, retention and staff development. It is no wonder that the NHS is struggling when the number of adult health and care students declined by 15% in the three years before the pandemic.

The pandemic also shone a light on the problems that our schools, colleges and early years providers were already facing. No doubt it exacerbated them, but it did not create them. Last week, the Chancellor set out a £3 billion investment in skills, and the Secretary of State claimed that it was the biggest in a decade—but it comes after a decade of cuts to post-16 provision. The Learning and Work Institute calculates that funding over the spending review period will still amount to only 60% of the 2010 figure.

It is astonishing that at a time when our economy has to adapt to the challenges that the Secretary of State referred to—globalisation, digitisation and climate change in the post-Brexit environment—investment in skills remains so lacking. Four in 10 young people are leaving education without the level of qualification they need, the number of apprenticeships has fallen by more than 40%, and 9 million adults lack basic skills in literacy or numeracy. No wonder the Chancellor can promise only a paltry 1.5% increase in growth in the final three years of the forecast period.

At the same time that it is talking up the importance of vocational education, the Department for Education is scrapping most BTECs—well-recognised and respected qualifications that give opportunities to hundreds of thousands of young people.

[Andrew Gwynne]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for raising the importance of BTECs, because for many young people and indeed many adults, BTECs are the route through the education system. As somebody who has a BTEC national certificate in business and finance and a higher national diploma in business and finance, I know that—it was my route through the education system. Let us make sure that we keep it open for future generations, too.

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Again and again, I have met people who have described their learning journey from BTECs to university and an excellent career. Of course we want T-levels to succeed, but there is no reason to remove other qualifications that provide a different route that is more appropriate for some young people. Under Labour, every young person will receive education that is appropriate to them, whether that is an apprenticeship, technical education or university, and will leave it ready for work and life.

[Emma Hardy]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Kate Green]

If my hon. Friend will forgive me, I will make some progress.

OECD data show that the UK has some of the world’s highest childcare costs—the cost of nursery provision for a one-year-old increased four times faster than wages between 2008 and 2016—but despite the high costs for parents, many early years providers are struggling to stay afloat. This year alone, nearly 3,000 childcare and early years providers have closed their doors. This Budget could have been an opportunity to put provision on a sustainable footing, reduce costs to parents and invest in quality, making a real difference to millions of families, but the announcements that we got were inadequate.

Don’t get me wrong: any investment in families with young children and in support for new parents is welcome, but the family hubs project is a pale imitation of what the Conservatives inherited in 2010. [Interruption.] “Nonsense,” says the Minister, but let me tell him that when Labour left office, there were 3,500 Sure Start centres delivering support to more than 2.9 million children in every local authority in the country. Since then, 1,000 children’s centres have closed. A moment ago, I think the Secretary of State was promising new family hubs in only half of local authorities. Can he tell me how many family hubs in total will be created as a result of the spending announcements?

By the 2021 summer term, children had missed an average of 115 days of schooling, and on 21 October, just before the half-term break, 248,000 children were still out of school as a result of covid, yet the Government’s response falls well below the scale of ambition needed for children’s educational recovery. The extra £1.8 billion announced by the Chancellor last week brings the Government’s recovery plans up to a total of £5 billion—far short of the £15 billion that their own expert adviser said would be needed to ensure that children make a full recovery from the pandemic.

Labour, by contrast, remains committed to our £15 billion children’s recovery plan. Whereas the Government will provide tutoring to just one in 16 pupils this year, Labour’s plan would resource schools to deliver tutoring to all who need it. We would deliver universal catch-up breakfast clubs and extend the school day for additional activities—I noted that the Secretary of State seemed to be in favour of that at Education questions yesterday, but he got nothing from the Chancellor. We would invest in training world-class teachers and teaching assistants and in supporting the early years sector, schools and colleges with an education recovery premium. We would prioritise young people’s mental health, giving every school access to a professional mental health counsellor.

[Andy Carter]

I have totted up all Labour’s uncosted spending plans to about £400 billion. From what I can see, Labour is proposing about £5 billion of extra taxes. Can the hon. Lady explain where the extra money will come from? Is it not still the case that Labour is the party that cannot be trusted to run the economy?

[Kate Green]

I have absolutely no idea where that £400 billion figure comes from. The hon. Member says that it is uncosted, but there is no such uncosted plan; he needs to check his figures. The £15 billion costed plan—a plan advised by the Government’s own expert adviser—will, of course, be covered by the covid funding pot that the Government themselves admit has to be set aside to meet the costs of the pandemic. If the hon. Member cares to examine the tax burden from the Budget, he will see that it is not Labour that is increasing taxes on hard-pressed families. Taxes will hit families by an extra £3,000 as a result of his Chancellor’s Budget.

[Yasmin Qureshi]

The hon. Member for Warrington South (Andy Carter) talks about financial prudence, but this Government spent £39 billion on the failed Test and Trace. How can Conservative Members talk about financial prudence?

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend makes the case.

Labour’s plan would deliver the wellbeing and academic support needed to meet the scale of the challenge and ensure that all children can reach their potential. That is the level of the investment that the Government should have been making in the nation’s children.

When we look at overall school spending, the picture does not get much better. The Chancellor announced a 2% per annum real-terms increase in school budgets over the next three years. I want the Secretary of State to listen to this very carefully, because we are messing around a bit with figures here. That increase will finally return school spending to 2010 levels, in real terms, in 2025. As Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has said,

“To have no growth in 15 years in such an important part of public services is unprecedented’’.

This means that 732,000 children in state-funded reception classes in 2010 have seen their whole school careers affected. A whole generation of children has been failed by consecutive Conservative Governments.

The Secretary of State spoke of a cash increase in school spending as a result of the Budget, but schools are facing a host of rising costs to set against that: covid costs, energy bills, and employer national insurance contributions. The ending of the public sector pay freeze is overdue, but it is schools that will have to fund the teacher pay settlement.

The impact of this underfunding is plain to see. Some 200,000 children are growing up in areas with not a single primary school rated good or outstanding. Forty per cent. of young people leave compulsory education without essential qualifications. By the time they finish their GCSEs, pupils from poorer families are 18 months behind their wealthier peers in terms of attainment, and a third of teachers leave our schools within five years of qualifying. Last week’s Budget was an opportunity to fix those deep-rooted problems, but the Chancellor failed to do so.

Youth services help to equip young people with the skills and confidence that they need for life. They provide careers guidance and mental health support, they are one of the most effective ways of tackling the root causes of crime, and they help to build community cohesion. However, although they have already experienced a decade of cuts, last week’s Budget went on to inflict on them the single biggest one-off cut in youth services for a decade, leaving a £470 million hole in the youth budget. The Chancellor’s boasts of investment cannot disguise this crippling cut. Under the last Labour Government, youth services were accessible to people whatever their background; today, they are a patchy postcode lottery.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Kate Green]

I am about to finish my speech, so I hope my hon. Friend will forgive me if I do not.

This Budget failed to address the challenges facing our education system—from early years to schools and from skills to higher education, about which the Chancellor said almost nothing last week—just as it failed to address the challenges facing the country. There was no plan to tackle the growing cost-of-living crisis, no plan to remove the enormous tax burden that the Conservatives have placed on working people and businesses, and no plan for growth, which is crucial to boosting our economy. This is not a Budget for the stronger economy of the future about which the Chancellor boasted; it is a Budget that lets down business, lets down our public services, and lets down the British people. They deserve better from this Conservative Government.

[Several hon. Members rose—]