Winter Fuel Payment
Kit Malthouse Excerpts(3 weeks, 5 days ago)
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James Murray
I am going to make some progress.
The Opposition did not like to be reminded of their legacy when they were in government, but let us have a look, shall we? What do they have to show for their years of reckless overspending? A failed asylum system, prisons at breaking point, more than 1 million people waiting for council homes, 4 million children growing up in poverty, and more than 7.5 million people on NHS waiting lists. This Government and every Member of this House who stood on my party’s manifesto were elected to turn things around.
Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)
Yesterday, in the other place, the Transport Minister cast doubt on the continuation of travel concessions for pensioners, which has caused significant alarm in my constituency and others. Notwithstanding the discussion we are having today, could the Minister reassure us that travel concessions for pensioners will continue under a Labour Government?
James Murray
I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. The Chancellor will take all decisions in the Budget on 30 October—[Interruption.] Let me make one important point to him as we approach the Budget on 30 October: we know there are going to be difficult decisions that we have to take in the Budget and, frankly, that is a direct consequence of the decisions taken by him and his colleagues when they were in government.
Public Spending: Inheritance
Kit Malthouse Excerpts(2 months, 1 week ago)
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Rachel Reeves
My hon. Friend is right. The people of Rother Valley will be shocked and appalled by the gross mismanagement of public finances, including a £6.4 billion overspend on asylum. That is why we are getting a grip on the public finances and public spending to put them on a firmer footing.
Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)
I congratulate you on your ascension, Madam Deputy Speaker. The right hon. Lady says she is keen on transparency. Can she confirm to the House that she had extensive access talks with senior civil servants in the Treasury in the run-up to the general election? It might be helpful, for transparency purposes, if she could lay the minutes of those meetings in the House of Commons for the rest of the House to understand. I am also concerned about the issue of misleading estimates being laid before the House. May I suggest, for the elucidation of Members, that she asks the permanent secretary at the Treasury, and the permanent secretaries of those Departments impacted by the decisions she has made today, to confirm to the House in writing that none of the information that should have been in the estimates was not included—if they were correct, was it included?—so we can see for ourselves whether she is covering up?
Rachel Reeves
The cover-up was from those on the Opposition Benches. The sooner we get an apology to the British people, the better.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)
The hon. Member will know that the Chair is not responsible for the content of contributions made by Ministers, but I am sure that his concern has been heard on the Government Benches. I am sure that if an error has been made in this instance, the Minister will seek to correct it as quickly as possible. It is for the Government to decide on the estimates that they put before the House.
Kit Malthouse
Further to that point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. The Chancellor of the Exchequer made certain assertions about timing during her statement. However, we know from the media that the contents of the statement were briefed to The Guardian at 8.58 pm on Thursday, just after the estimates had been voted on. While I understand that the Chair is not responsible for the content of what is said at the Dispatch Box, the Chair is responsible for the integrity of documents that are laid before the House and on which we vote and rely. May I ask whether this is a matter for the Prime Minister in his governance of the ministerial code, or for the Commissioner for Standards in his upholding of standards in the House? Prima facie, in the absence of any evidence from the Chancellor, it looks as if we have all been misled.
Madam Deputy Speaker
The right hon. Member will know as well as I do that that is not for the Chair to decide. It is for the Government to decide what they put in their estimates and in documents that are published.
Economy, Welfare and Public Services
Kit Malthouse Excerpts(2 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Rachel Reeves
I have been compared to a lot of things, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I have never been compared to Joseph Stalin.
Our approach is a brownfield-first approach. We will reintroduce those mandatory targets; of course it is up to local authorities and local communities to decide where the housing should be built, but the answer cannot always be no. If the answer is always no, we will continue as we are, with home ownership declining and mortgages and rents going through the roof. On the Government side of the House, we are not willing to tolerate that.
This King’s Speech shows that we are getting to work. As my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister set out, our programme for government is founded on principles of security, fairness and opportunity. Our No. 1 mission is to secure sustained economic growth in our great country through a new partnership between Government, business and working people that prioritises wealth creation for all of our communities.
We will fix the foundations of our economy so we can rebuild Britain and make every part of our country better off. There are a number of important pieces of legislation in the King’s Speech that will help us to grow the economy. In this speech, I will focus on three in particular: the Budget Responsibility Bill to restore economic stability, the national wealth fund Bill to drive investments and the pension schemes Bill to reform our economy. Those Bills speak not just to our programme for government, but also to trust in politics. They show that we will govern as we campaigned and that we will meet our promises to the British people.
In the election campaign, I said the first step we would take would be to restore economic stability, because stability is the precondition to a healthy, growing economy. It is how we keep taxes, inflation and mortgages as low as possible. After years of irresponsibility, we are putting our economy on firm ground once again. We introduced the new Budget Responsibility Bill on Thursday to deliver on our manifesto commitment to introduce a fiscal lock so that I can keep an iron grip on our country’s finances.
Kit Malthouse (North West Hampshire) (Con)
The Chancellor and I sat on the Treasury Committee together many years ago, and she will know from our time together that economics is as much art as it is science. Given that she is effectively giving a veto over economic policy to the OBR through this Bill, she must recognise that we need to understand what the people in the OBR believe, what their theories of economics are and what principles they attach themselves to. What further scrutiny of the chair of the OBR and the people doing the forecast will be available to this House, given that effectively they will be co-Chancellor with her during the next few years?
Rachel Reeves
The Treasury Committee, as the right hon. Gentleman knows, can call in the chair and other members of the Office for Budget Responsibility, but his comments show exactly why we need this Bill: so that never again can we have a repeat of the mini Budget. The Bill will require every announcement that makes significant permanent changes to tax and spending to be subject to an independent assessment by the Office for Budget Responsibility. Why? Because unfunded, reckless commitments do not just threaten our public finances; they threaten people’s incomes and they threaten people’s mortgages. We saw that in the wake of the mini-Budget presided over by the former Member for South West Norfolk. I understand that she has taken umbrage in recent days at the idea that that episode was disastrous. Well, if any Conservative Member would like to dispute that fact today, I would be more than happy to give way. [Hon. Members: “Come on then!”] They cheered it at the time, but they are not cheering it now, and I do not imagine that they would put it on their leaflets.
The Conservatives should be ashamed of what they did because people up and down the country are still paying the price for the chaos that they caused. We say: never again. The Budget Responsibility Bill will enshrine that commitment in law.
Rachel Reeves
I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention. One of the biggest challenges people face with getting a mortgage is building up the deposit. That is why we have committed to a mortgage guarantee scheme, to help those people who cannot rely on the bank of mum and dad to get on the housing ladder. That is a really important commitment, as is our commitment to build the homes: unless we build more homes, home ownership will continue to go backwards, as it did over the past few years.
Alongside stability and investment in our economy must come reform, because delivering economic growth requires tough choices. It means taking on vested interests and confronting issues that politicians have too often avoided. The last Government refused to engage with those choices, and refused to level with the British people about what was required. This Government will be different. We have already demonstrated that through a series of reforms to our planning system, and are bringing forward further legislation in the King’s Speech to get Britain building.
Today, I want to focus on another area of our economy where reform is vital: our pension schemes. People across our country work hard to save for the future; they want a better, more secure retirement with the most generous pension possible. At the same time, British businesses with high growth potential need capital to support their expansion. Pension funds are at the heart of this. There will soon be over £800 billion of assets in defined contribution pension schemes, but for too long, those assets have not been targeted towards UK markets. That has impacted British savers, and it has impacted British business.
The last Government also said that this was a problem, and I welcome that acknowledgement, but they never introduced the legislation needed to make the change. We believe in deeds, not words, so we will strengthen investment from private pension providers by bringing forward the pension schemes Bill in the King’s Speech. It will boost pension pots by over £11,000 through a new and improved value for money framework. Through an investment shift in DC schemes, just a 1% shift in asset allocation could deliver £8 billion of new productive investment into the UK economy.
To ensure that the Bill is as strong as possible, I am today launching a pensions investment review, led by the first ever joint Commons Minister appointed between the Treasury and the Department for Work and Pensions—my hon. Friend the Member for Wycombe (Emma Reynolds), the Pensions Minister. This will include a review of the local government pension scheme, the seventh largest pension fund in the world, to ensure it is getting the best value from the savings of nearly 7 million public sector workers, the majority of whom are women and the majority of whom are low-paid. They deserve a pension that is working for them. Together, these reforms will kick-start economic growth by unlocking investment that has been tied up for too long.