Budget Resolutions

Debate between Liam Byrne and Ed Davey

Wednesday 11th March 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD)]

The World Health Organisation pronounced today that the coronavirus is now a pandemic, so it is not surprising that the Bank of England and the Government have together issued a big joint package of economic stimulus, which is to be welcomed. The question is: is it the right size? The truth is that we do not know. The levels of uncertainty are extremely high, and we will need to keep this under review. I hope that the Government stand ready to come back to the House if the economic downturn that will be caused by coronavirus spirals further.

I particularly hope that the Government will keep under review the support for people on low incomes who have to self-isolate. People working in the gig economy, people on zero-hours contracts and the self-employed are particularly vulnerable, and the Government need to ensure that the measures they have announced today go far enough. It would be completely wrong if we gave tens of billions of pounds to the banks during the 2008 financial crisis but were now not able to look after people working hard on low incomes. That has to be a priority.

When I look at this Budget today, I am deeply alarmed: I am alarmed by the growth figures. I have looked at Budgets over 30 years, and I have rarely seen a Budget where the growth forecast for the British economy for the whole forecasting period is less than 2%—and that is before coronavirus is taken into account. This year, with poor world economic growth, it is 1.1%, before coronavirus, but at the end of this forecasting period, in 2023 it is just 1.3%, and in 2024 it is just 1.4%. That is a disastrous performance.

These figures are from the independent Office for Budget Responsibility, and the of course the question is: what is lying behind those figures? If it is a forecast for four or five years’ time, it is not the coronavirus and it is not the world economy; it is something that is going wrong in our economy, and it is the Government who must take the blame. So what is it? When we read the OBR report, and I have been flicking through it, it suggests that—guess what?—it is the impact of Brexit and the Government’s new immigration system.

The Conservative party may not like the fact, but it is there in the OBR report. On page 8, it says that the UK’s output has already fallen by 2%, thanks to the Brexit uncertainty, and the future loss will be at least 4% of national income. This will hit the living standards of all our constituents. That is why productivity performance is down, and when our small companies are faced with a barrage of red tape at the borders, not surprisingly exports will go down and we will see small companies go to the wall. I do not see in these Budget proposals anything to help those small businesses.

[Liam Byrne]

The growth figures the right hon. Gentleman quite rightly draws the House’s attention to are after the Government have chucked in a £174 billion fiscal stimulus and the Bank of England has slashed interest rates to an all-time low. I would draw his attention to the fact that productivity in our economy is now absolutely broken, and that surely is a damning indictment of the economic strategy of the last few years.

[Sir Edward Davey]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. It is the failure to invest in skills and the failure to realise that Brexit is going to damage productivity, while the attack on immigration, which is important for so many parts of our economy, will hit that too.

I worry about the self-employed and small businesses. They are suffering from the unfair business rates and they are suffering from things such as IR35. The Government are completely silently on IR35 today. They promise a reform of business rates. Liberal Democrats have been arguing for that for several years, with a well-thought-through proposal using land value tax, but the Government seem to be going to kick this into the long grass. That is not good enough when our small businesses are under such pressure.

The other issue I find disappointing is climate change. The Government have been trying to pretend that this Budget is going to take action on climate change. Let us look at it. With a fuel duty freeze again and £27 billion on 4,000 miles of road, that does not sound like a green transport policy to me. Then they announce, as though it is going to make any difference, £1 billion on green transport measures. This is completely absurd. The transport sector is the biggest sector for our emissions, and we need a completely different green transport strategy if we are to be serious about the climate. We need to make sure that we are not expanding airports, but that we are really investing in the electric vehicle infrastructure and giving incentives for electric vehicles, and this Budget does nothing for that.

If there is a real area on which we need to see significant Government expenditure, it is refurbishing the housing stock. We all know that that is where a huge amount of the emissions come from, and we all know that that is where there are easy wins that will reduce our constituents’ fuel bills, tackle fuel poverty and create jobs in every community. Why are the Government not doing that? They should of course bring back the zero- carbon homes laws that we passed and the Conservatives abolished, but, no, they are not keen on real action on climate change.

Then there is the Government’s announcement on carbon capture and storage. I was the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change when we were pushing this, and there was a £1 billion set-up fund, with a competition with two projects, with several billions of pounds running forward. We were the world leaders because we have a comparative advantage with our amazing engineers, with the North sea in which to store a lot of the emissions, and with our oil and gas industry and the skills from it.

Instead of exploiting that, what happened in 2015, when the former Chancellor, George Osborne, had his way? He cut that project overnight, not even telling Shell, which had shelled out £30 million. It was a disgraceful act against climate action. We need CCS, not just to green our power sector, but to green our heat sector and our industry. We could be world leaders, but that was a disastrous policy. The idea that these projects, which the Red Book claims will take the next 10 years, are a replacement for the level of ambition that we once had, is frankly shocking. The Government have failed very badly on the green agenda.

Finally, I wish to talk about the care sector. We need a care revolution in this country, not just in care for the elderly, but in care for adults with learning disabilities, which makes up the biggest, and fastest rising part of local authority expenditure. I speak as a father of a disabled child who cannot walk or talk—he only said “daddy” two years ago, and he is 12—and I worry about what will happen to him when my wife and I are gone. Obviously, I am trying to ensure that I make provision for my son, but I am lucky enough to be able to do that. Hundreds of thousands of parents of special needs children will not be able to make such provision, and the state will have to work out how we care properly for those adults, who will be of working age for many years.

We have not even begun to debate that issue. Instead, we have a care sector on its knees. Care homes are closing and there are shortages of care staff. That is partly because of Brexit—I say that because it is true—partly because of immigration restrictions, and partly because of the Government’s failure to address issues of social care. The “Interim NHS People Plan” stated that dealing with the nursing shortage is the single biggest and most urgent need for us to address, yet the Government have not done that. Social care, whether directly in the NHS or through local authorities, is one of the massive issues facing our country. We must debate it and get a grip on it, but this Budget does not do anything. It is an astounding omission.

Data Protection Bill [Lords]

Debate between Liam Byrne and Ed Davey

3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Wednesday 9th May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Liam Byrne]

There is no right to digital literacy under the Bill, which is why we propose the five rights as the core of new schedule 1 in which, as the Minister knows, we go much further. The provision sets out rights to equality of treatment, security, free expression, access, privacy, ownership and control, the right not to be discriminated against as a result of automated decision making, and rights on participation, protection and removal.

Rights are sometimes scattered through thousands and thousands of pages of legislation, which is where we are on data protection today. That is why from time to time, as a country, we decide to make bold declaratory statements of what principles should guide us. These are methods of simplification and consolidation, and we are pretty good at that in this country. When we press our proposal to enable the creation of such a bill of rights to a Division a little later, we hope that it will be the call that the Government need to begin the process of consultation, thought, argument and debate about the digital rights that we need in this century and what they need to look like. Rights should not be imposed from the top down; they should come from the grassroots up, and the process of conversation and consultation is long overdue. To help the Government, we will accelerate that debate during this year.

The second point I wish to make is about amendment 15, which would ensure that the rights set out in the GDPR would stretch to everyone in this country. It would mean that the Government would not be permitted to knock out selective rights for certain people who just happen to be newcomers to this country. The proposal to withhold data rights from migrants and newcomers is a disgrace and does not deserve to be in the Bill. In Committee, Ministers were unable to tell us why the Bill’s crime prevention provisions could not be stretched to accommodate their ambitions for immigration control. The Minister has not been able to give us a succinct definition of “immigration control” today, and we have not been able to hear about the lessons learned from Windrush. Frankly, the debate has been left poorly informed, and we have had promises that letters will be sent to hon. Members long after tonight’s vote.

[Sir Edward Davey]

I totally agree with the right hon. Gentleman’s point. He says that this is about newcomers and immigrants, and I am sure he will agree that it also applies to British citizens’ ability to get their immigration file. Can he confirm that that is the case?

[Liam Byrne]

I am not sure that that is the case. British citizens have confirmed rights under the GDPR—that is safeguarded under EU legislation—but the risks I am worried about are the same ones as the right hon. Gentleman. I spent two and a half years in the Home Office. I recognised many of the errors that were made by the former Home Secretary in the situation that we inherited back in 2006, so I do not think that lessons have been learnt from Windrush, or that many lessons have been learnt from errors over the past eight to 10 years. The Home Office is a great Department of State, with tremendous strengths. It has fantastic civil servants who do an amazing job, without the resources to do it properly and very often without the level of support they need from their Ministers, but it is a human institution and such institutions make mistakes. To correct those, we have tribunals and courts through which people can test decisions made by officials without the disinfectant of sunlight. Unless we equip those individuals with everything they need to make their case effectively, we risk injustice. After our debates over the past month, we must do everything we can so that we never run that risk again.