Budget Resolutions

Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

And it is declared that it is expedient in the public interest that this Resolution should have statutory effect under the provisions of the Provisional Collection of Taxes Act 1968.

[Mr Speaker]

I inform the House that I have not selected any amendments to the motion.

--- Later in debate ---

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I know that Mr Speaker is looking at his watch, so perhaps the hon. Lady will forgive me if I make some headway and let others into the debate.

[Mr Speaker]

It is not about headway—I think a mere finish might be helpful.

[Nadhim Zahawi]

Indeed, Mr Speaker. We are investing £2.7 billion of capital funding to improve provision for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities.[Official Report, 2 December 2021, Vol. 704, c. 10MC.] That funding represents a significant investment in high needs provision and will help to deliver tens of thousands of new places for some of the most vulnerable children in our country. Over the next three years, we will provide £259 million to expand the number of places available in secure and open residential children’s homes. That will provide high-quality, safe homes for some of our most vulnerable children and young people.

We will also support families through our adoption strategy. That will go a long way to improving the process of matching children who need a home with the adopters who are desperate to provide one for them. That means encouraging all those who can provide a loving home to come forward, not just those from a narrow, rather middle-class demographic. We will, in due course, see more centres of excellence for our regional adoption agencies.

Every child deserves to grow up in a secure and loving home and every single one of us, young and old alike, deserves to live in a community where we feel safe. The whole country has been shocked to the core by the recent violent attacks on people who have been walking home or out enjoying themselves, especially vulnerable young women. This is simply unacceptable. We promised to recruit an extra 20,000 police officers in 2022-23 and we are putting an extra £540 million into recruiting a further 8,000 additional police officers. We are allocating £42 million for new crime and drugs programmes. That will help to fund our Safer Streets programme and will help more people to improve home security, especially in areas that have a high incidence of burglary, car theft and robbery. We have always taken a zero-tolerance approach to crime, and tackling drugs is a priority, especially through our county lines programme. We will set up a national crime and justice lab to analyse crime reduction and prevention data.

Part and parcel of keeping our streets safe is making sure that those who threaten that security are dealt with quickly and efficiently through our criminal justice system. The covid pandemic has had a massive impact on this, so we are making an extra £2.2 billion available to manage the increased number of offenders being brought to justice and to reduce backlogs in criminal courts. There will be an extra 20,000 prison places, which builds on the additional 18,000 prison places that we announced at the last spending review, plus a further 2,000 temporary places. That represents the largest prison-building programme in a generation.

For those people who have been victims of crime, we will increase our support services to over £185 million a year. Security, safety and support are going to underpin our public services, but we must also take a proactive approach to make sure that all our communities are vibrant, resilient places where people can live, learn and work. One of the chief ways to make sure that everyone can get from A to B smoothly and efficiently is through world-class public services, and we will need world-class local transport systems. The investment there makes a huge difference across the board.

I know that you are anxious about the time, Mr Speaker, so I will conclude. This Budget will provide billions of pounds to deliver the public services that the British people deserve. It puts skills, schools and families at the centre of everything we do and it embeds levelling up throughout all our services and our national infrastructure. The Budget is a clear statement of intent: world-class public services backed by £150 billion a year in cash terms.