Finance (No. 2) Bill

Liz McInnes Excerpts

2nd reading: House of Commons
Monday 11th December 2017 Commons Chamber

[Liz McInnes (Heywood and Middleton) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this debate.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Bootle (Peter Dowd) said, this Finance Bill is testament to an out-of-touch Government with no idea of the reality of people’s lives and no plan to improve them. In the time that I have, I want to make particular reference to the lack of any apparent willingness on the Government’s part to invest in the west to east Crossrail for the north that we in the so-called northern powerhouse so desperately need and want.

In the Budget, the Chancellor made no mention of investment to improve the trans-Pennine rail route other than an announcement about improved wi-fi. As the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, said, at least we will be able to text and tweet our families and friends to let them know that we will be late. It is not just northern voices saying this: Derek Robbins, senior lecturer in transport and tourism at Bournemouth University, said:

“I would…describe the lack of progress towards a modernised and reliable transPennine rail route as more than disappointing, given that it is an essential investment for future economic growth in the north.”

Labour is planning to borrow to invest, unlike this Government who borrow to cover day-to-day spending. Investment that gives higher returns than the cost of financing the extra debt makes sense. The £10 billion cost of Crossrail for the north would unlock £85 billion of additional economic growth. However, I do not believe that this Government have the imagination or the will to make the northern powerhouse anything more than just a slogan. When I asked the Secretary of State for Transport what conversations he had had with the northern powerhouse Minister about Crossrail for the north, his response was to talk about the electrification of the line from Manchester to Liverpool. That lack of response led me to believe that the answer to my question was probably none. Maybe the Secretary of State has the same problem I have encountered when trying to set up meetings with the aforementioned Minister for the northern powerhouse. I am still waiting for a response to a request for a meeting that was sent in October.

Yesterday, we witnessed an historic moment for Manchester’s rail network, with the opening of the Ordsall Chord—an £85 million scheme linking the main central Manchester stations of Victoria, Oxford Road and Piccadilly. However, our enthusiasm for this achievement was tempered somewhat by our concern over Government investment in rail in the north. For Manchester to really benefit from the Ordsall Chord, we need investment in Piccadilly and Oxford Road stations. For High Speed 2 to bring any benefit to the people of Greater Manchester, we need expansion of Piccadilly station, and that expansion must also take in and plan for HS3—Crossrail for the north. Yet the Government have indicated that Piccadilly might get only a digital upgrade, rather than the extra platforms that are needed. This decision has been met with despair from rail action groups, which have pointed out the very real need for physical capacity for more trains to go through the station, and that digital signalling is just not enough.

As I said immediately following the Budget statement, that statement was notable more for what it did not say than for what it did say. There was nothing for our police and fire services, nothing for social care, nothing for children’s services and no adequate equality impact assessment. For the last seven years, we have had nothing from this Government but missed opportunities and missed targets. The five-year austerity plan did not work; now it is the 15-year austerity plan. The Government keep missing their targets, but they keep returning to them—just with a longer timeline every single time.

This Government’s obsession with deficit reduction is at the expense of investment for our future, and it is people in the north who are losing out the most. In terms of transport spending, London has received over five times more public spending in the last five years than the north-west—hardly a country that works for everyone.

[Helen Whately (Faversham and Mid Kent) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Heywood and Middleton (Liz McInnes),although I could not help but notice that her speech was almost entirely about spending, with almost nothing about raising money for that spending. The Finance Bill is about raising revenue.

[Liz McInnes]

If the £10 billion was spent on Crossrail for the north, it would bring revenues of £85 billion. I have talked about spending and raising money.

[Helen Whately]

I appreciate the hon. Lady’s point, but I still think that she very much spoke about spending and not about the content of this Finance Bill.

Our job in this House is to make difficult decisions not just on what we spend money on but on how we raise that money—who we tax and what we tax, when we are reluctant to tax people and would much rather they had the money in their pockets to spend themselves. Our aim is to make things better for our constituents, young or old and those in between. It is not our job to make promises that cannot be kept, to write cheques that we cannot cash, and just to say things that sound nice, like massive amounts of spending, but might turn out to have nasty consequences like high unemployment. Labour Members may tell us differently, but spending that we cannot afford is not the moral high ground—it is the moral low ground.

This Finance Bill builds on the tough decisions of the Governments led by Conservative Prime Ministers over the past seven years who have reduced the deficit by 75%, while as of next year debt will fall as a share of GDP. Let us not throw that all away, as Labour Members would, with uncosted proposals and unquantified borrowing. As we heard earlier, they could not answer our questions on how much their borrowing would cost.