Budget Resolutions

Liam Byrne Excerpts

Wednesday 26th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne (Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North) (Lab)]

I do not know what Budget the right hon. Member for Hertsmere (Sir Oliver Dowden) was reading, but it was not the Budget that was put on the table this afternoon. I think the Chancellor got the judgment exactly right today. She had a difficult inheritance, a difficult hand and difficult decisions to take, but she got the calls absolutely right. Under the Budget, growth this year and business investment over the course of this Parliament are forecast to rise, and inflation is coming down. Forecast interest rates are coming down, energy bills for our constituents are coming down, and child poverty is set to collapse. That means that 8,900 people in my constituency will be better off because of this Budget—a Labour Budget delivered by a Labour Chancellor this afternoon.

I have been in this House for 21 years. I have sat on both Front Benches and on both sets of Back Benches, and over the years I have seen the selective amnesia that bedevils debate in this place, and the problem of unreliable narrators, but I have to say that I have never seen amnesia on as epic a scale as I did from the Leader of the Opposition today. It is quite well established that back in 2010, I thought the numbers were a little bit tight. I thought difficult decisions were going to be needed, which is why we left a judiciously balanced Budget—two thirds spending cuts, one third taxes rises—that would have halved the deficit in four years and brought debt borrowing down by 2016. That, of course, was not the strategy pursued by the last Government, and what difference did that make? The Conservatives saddled this country with an extraordinary £1 trillion of debt more than the situation we left. That is why we are paying £1 in every £10 in interest rates today—it is because they more than doubled the national debt.

[Simon Hoare]

rose—

[Liam Byrne]

Before we hear any nonsense about covid, let us remember that 80% to 90% of the increase in debt that the Conservatives saddled us with came before the covid lockdowns began.

[Simon Hoare]

Oh, it is nothing as contemporary as covid—don’t worry about that. I just wondered how much money the right hon. Member left in the coffers when he was Chief Secretary in 2010.

[Liam Byrne]

I can tell the hon. Member. I do not know what his facility with maths is like, or if he realises that a trillion has 12 noughts, but we left the national debt £1 trillion lower than it is today—£2.7 trillion. That is how much this country is now borrowing.

The great tragedy is that if the previous Government had borrowed money at low interest costs and invested it in something that enhanced productivity, we would be in a better position today and the Chancellor would not have had to deliver the Budget she had to deliver today. Don’t take my word for it; the International Monetary Fund was clear in its report on 25 July that our productivity growth under the Conservatives collapsed by a third compared with the good old new Labour years. Our productivity divergence with the United States is so serious. Our productivity growth has been half that of the United States, and the OBR is clear today that the downgrade on growth that it has baked into its numbers is entirely due to the productivity collapse because the Conservatives wasted the money during their 14 years in office.

I should just say, by the bye, that because the Conservatives are the Conservatives, they managed to put £1 trillion on the debt and to collapse the productivity numbers, and still to put inequality through the roof. That is why we have all had food bank queues in our constituencies that we will never forget. I will never forget for as long as I live the phenomenon of collecting food in inner-city Birmingham because our food banks had run out of food. I will never forget the children at Adderley school who were literally helping restock our food banks by taking Penguin bars out of their lunch boxes to put them in food collection crates so their classmates did not go hungry at lunch time. That is the reality of the child poverty legacy the Conservatives left us with, and that is the legacy that the Chancellor got to grips with today.

The Business and Trade Committee looks forward to scrutinising the proposals that have been laid out today. We have been travelling the country over the last couple of weeks talking to businesses about what they wanted out of this Budget, and three things were clear. These are isles of wonder. We now stand on the threshold of an extraordinary new era of innovation. This is an extraordinary and inventive country; we have been since the industrial revolution started in Birmingham back in 1761, but that will be nothing compared to what is about to unfold in this country. We are at the front of the grid in the race for the 21st century, but we need to mobilise capital on a completely new scale. That is why certainty, certainty, certainty for business was so important. I welcome the fact that the headroom has been put up to £22 billion today.

I welcome the fact that the Chancellor is ending the biannual circus of fiscal speculation by having one forecast a year. I have to say to the House that I seriously think that Mr Hughes needs to consider his position. The fact that we had a leak of the OBR forecast before this House got to debate the Budget is appalling, and this uncertainty has bedevilled us. Alongside that, we have to step up the mobilisation of capital on a completely different scale.

[Paul Waugh (Rochdale) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Liam Byrne]

I will in a moment.

That is why I absolutely welcome the package that the Chancellor has set out today to mobilise investment capital in a radical new way: the expanding of enterprise management incentives, the boosting of the venture capital trusts, and UK listing relief. That is almost £3 billion of extra incentives for entrepreneurs in this country. That is a game changer not just for start-ups, but for scale-ups, so we can end the craziness of brilliant inventors in this country starting new businesses, growing them nicely and then them having snapped up and shifted out to the United States. We have to ensure that we are growing and fostering more big, global dominating companies here in this country, so I welcome the way the Chancellor leant in behind those firms today.

The third thing we have to do is to improve the return on investments made in this country. That means a couple of things. It means bringing down energy costs radically. We did not have a business energy cost scheme scored in the Budget today, but that is because I know the Government are out to consultation on it. Every single member of the Committee would implore the Government to do whatever it takes to ensure that business energy costs in this country are internationally competitive. It is wrong that firms like Nissan say to us that their energy costs up in Sunderland are the most expensive of any Nissan plant in the world. We must bring business energy costs down.

Alongside that, the message that we hear from small businesses in particular is that we must bring down business rates. From looking at the policy decisions in the scorecard, it looks like there is a £4.2 billion subsidy to help bring business rates down. That should mean that we have the lowest business rates this country has seen, which is a good thing, but I urge the Chancellor to go further by cutting the cost of red tape in a bold and radical way.

As the Committee travelled around the country, business after business told us that they want not just less red tape but better regulation. Crucially, they want Departments and regulators to co-ordinate with each other, so that we do not have one Department over here making one decision and another over there making a different one. Ensuring that the Whitehall machine moves at the speed of business in this new age of AI will be more and more important as a competitive advantage. This is one of the best places in the world to be an inventor or build a start-up business. We now need to ensure that we are one of the best places in the world to scale up a business. That will be the nature of the questions that the Committee will put to Ministers over the weeks to come.

One thing above all shone through in the Chancellor’s statement: ambition for, and confidence in, the future of this country. That is why one of the most important numbers we will read in the OBR forecast is that business investment is not flat or falling but is set to soar by £6 billion over the forecast period. That ambition for this country stands in stark contrast to the amnesia of the Conservative party. That is because we on the Labour Benches know how futures are really built.

[Several hon. Members rose—]