Budget Resolutions

Lloyd Russell-Moyle Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd November 2021 Commons Chamber

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady, and I am sure the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care will take a careful look at her letter and respond in good time.

Nevertheless, it is this Government who have grasped the nettle of adult social care and will deliver on capping personal care costs, which can be so debilitating, at £86,000. While £1.7 billion will improve the wider social care system, including the East Riding of Yorkshire, as announced in September, at least £500 million of that will go towards improving qualifications, skills and wellbeing across the social care workforce.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

Is it not the case that the additional money for adult social care is on a promise that might come along in a few years’ time, and that most local authorities will not see a penny immediately to tackle the immediate problems that they have in adult social care? That is why I tabled my amendment; it was quite rightly not selected, but it would have brought in £15 billion extra and not harmed anyone earning under £50,000. Why will the Government not just make national insurance a flat rate for everyone?

[Nadhim Zahawi]

I am grateful for the hon. Member’s question. I think he may have missed, while trying to catch your eye, Mr Speaker, what I just said about the £1.7 billion to improve the wider social care system that was announced in September. The additional £3.6 billion to local government that was announced in the Budget is more money. This is not an arms race on how much we can spend; this Government are interested in delivering outcomes. Covid has, no doubt, added extra challenges to our reforming agenda, but it has not deflected us from delivering our promises; it has made our commitment more focused as we deliver and build back better. For me, that means skills, schools and families.

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[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend makes the case.

Labour’s plan would deliver the wellbeing and academic support needed to meet the scale of the challenge and ensure that all children can reach their potential. That is the level of the investment that the Government should have been making in the nation’s children.

When we look at overall school spending, the picture does not get much better. The Chancellor announced a 2% per annum real-terms increase in school budgets over the next three years. I want the Secretary of State to listen to this very carefully, because we are messing around a bit with figures here. That increase will finally return school spending to 2010 levels, in real terms, in 2025. As Paul Johnson, the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has said,

“To have no growth in 15 years in such an important part of public services is unprecedented’’.

This means that 732,000 children in state-funded reception classes in 2010 have seen their whole school careers affected. A whole generation of children has been failed by consecutive Conservative Governments.

The Secretary of State spoke of a cash increase in school spending as a result of the Budget, but schools are facing a host of rising costs to set against that: covid costs, energy bills, and employer national insurance contributions. The ending of the public sector pay freeze is overdue, but it is schools that will have to fund the teacher pay settlement.

The impact of this underfunding is plain to see. Some 200,000 children are growing up in areas with not a single primary school rated good or outstanding. Forty per cent. of young people leave compulsory education without essential qualifications. By the time they finish their GCSEs, pupils from poorer families are 18 months behind their wealthier peers in terms of attainment, and a third of teachers leave our schools within five years of qualifying. Last week’s Budget was an opportunity to fix those deep-rooted problems, but the Chancellor failed to do so.

Youth services help to equip young people with the skills and confidence that they need for life. They provide careers guidance and mental health support, they are one of the most effective ways of tackling the root causes of crime, and they help to build community cohesion. However, although they have already experienced a decade of cuts, last week’s Budget went on to inflict on them the single biggest one-off cut in youth services for a decade, leaving a £470 million hole in the youth budget. The Chancellor’s boasts of investment cannot disguise this crippling cut. Under the last Labour Government, youth services were accessible to people whatever their background; today, they are a patchy postcode lottery.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Kate Green]

I am about to finish my speech, so I hope my hon. Friend will forgive me if I do not.

This Budget failed to address the challenges facing our education system—from early years to schools and from skills to higher education, about which the Chancellor said almost nothing last week—just as it failed to address the challenges facing the country. There was no plan to tackle the growing cost-of-living crisis, no plan to remove the enormous tax burden that the Conservatives have placed on working people and businesses, and no plan for growth, which is crucial to boosting our economy. This is not a Budget for the stronger economy of the future about which the Chancellor boasted; it is a Budget that lets down business, lets down our public services, and lets down the British people. They deserve better from this Conservative Government.

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[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

While the Chancellor presented his Budget as the best Budget in 10 years, he seemed to forget what party has been in control of the country for 10 years. The reason why this miserable Budget is the best of all the miserable Budgets of the last 10 years is that a miserable party has governed our country for the last 10 years. It has cut, cut and cut every time.

We have seen £1 billion of cuts in youth services since 2010, when the Liberal Democrats brought the Conservatives into power, and we see further cuts to youth services in this Budget. I know from my work on the all-party parliamentary group on youth affairs that many Conservative Members think youth services should be invested in and that the failure to invest in them, and cuts to them, have caused many social problems in their communities. It is a shame that the hon. Member for Mansfield (Ben Bradley) is not in his place. We have done much work on youth services in his area, where I have seen really good projects. I am sure, though of course he will not say it publicly, he is disappointed that there is a real-terms cut for youth services—and if he is not, he should be looking at the small print, because that is the reality.

Even when there is investment in youth services, it is in buildings. I love a new shiny building; there is nothing better as the local MP than going to cut the ribbon, getting a nice photoshoot for our next political leaflet. However, the reality is that we do not need large numbers of new youth centres. There is a need for some to be refurbished; there is a need for some to be returned from use as government offices, because they ended up being glorified council offices rather than active youth centres. That has happened because we do not have the operating costs for those youth centres up and down the country.

When I speak to housing associations, they say, “Well, if you really need a youth centre, we can probably build that within the framework of the local housing budget we have, but we can’t pay for the day-to-day costs.” Have the Government provided any support for that? No. We see in my constituency, for example, the Conservative-controlled council writing a press release in the middle of the night to say it is going to close the 1,000 square metres main library in Peacehaven and replace it with a 35 square metres facility, because of budget cuts and other changes that the council says are unforeseen.

That is not unique. It is a great shame, of course, that a Conservative-controlled council would do that, and particularly that it would do so without speaking to the local Labour councillors, or to the local town and parish councillors who wrote to them asking for a dialogue on the matter. However, I will ignore the snub from the Conservative county council leadership and the officers there, who have shown complete disregard for Peacehaven time and again. Only last year, in the dead of night, the council filled in the local primary school swimming pool—a pool paid for by the local community. During covid, the council sent in the bulldozers and bulldozed it up, saying that it cost too much to run. We said, “Surely it costs more to bulldoze it over than to keep it and mothball it?” But that is enough about the dangers of the Conservative council in East Sussex abandoning Peacehaven. The reason the council has to do those things, even though they are the wrong choices, is that its funding has been cut to the bone time and again by this Government.

That is why I tabled an amendment today. It was quite rightly not selected, and I did not expect it to be, but I tabled it to say that the upper earnings threshold on national insurance should be abolished. That would mean that everyone who earns over the primary threshold should just pay the same percentage, which to me seems fair. Someone who earns £40,000 should pay the same percentage as people earning £60,000. At the moment, people earning £60,000 can pay 3%, while someone earning below the upper threshold has to pay 13%. That does not seem fair to me. Abolishing that upper threshold would raise between £15 billion and £20 billion. We have to put a range on these things, because of course with tax funnelling and so on, we do not know what we will actually get, but the lowest estimate is £14.5 billion.

The precept, the Government’s measures and the measure I have proposed would cover almost all the costs of adult social care that local authorities up and down this country are having to pay. That would free up our councils to do what they should be doing, which is providing libraries and youth services, and not feeling that they have to provide adult social care. That is a plan for adult social care, not the mysterious plan involving money that might come down the line in a few years that we heard from the Chancellor. That is why I tabled my amendment.

It is also important to realise that in this Budget there are tax giveaways. Who are those tax giveaways to? Not the ordinary person. There is £4 billion in tax cuts for banks in this country—banks that have made record profits in this period. We see no real action on companies such as Southern Water, which keeps pumping pollution, filth and sewage into our seas and rivers. When I met the chief executive officer of Southern Water, he said, “I don’t understand why my staff are getting such a bad time.” I said, “It might be because you’ve just awarded yourself half a million pounds in bonus while also being fined for illegal activity.”

Did this Budget tackle any of that? Did this Budget support money going in to transform our Victorian sewers or measures to repatriate the excessive profits of corporations? No, it did not. It left our seas dirty, our libraries closed and our youth services abandoned. What a shame; what a missed opportunity—but what did we expect from them?

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[Mr Clarke]

I absolutely will, because there is sometimes said to be ambiguity about levelling up. It is clear to me that it is about life chances through life, from cradle to grave. It is about jobs, prospects, investment in skills and jobs, and all of that comes from the start of life. I know that my hon. Friend will be doing a fantastic job in Nottinghamshire to help to deliver that.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Clarke]

Yes, I will. It is always a pleasure to give way to the hon. Gentleman.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

So much for intergenerational levelling up—why have the Government cut the youth budget? It is the biggest cut in youth funding in 10 years.

[Mr Clarke]

The Government stand fully behind our youth budget. From the National Citizen Service to youth hubs, our wider work is clear. We are fully committed to ensuring that young people benefit as part of the Budget and spending review.

Meanwhile, we are spending record sums on improving connectivity and have allocated £5.7 billion to eight city regions to transform their transport systems. There is also the £4.8 billion levelling-up fund. We are taking on the criminals who make too many people’s lives a misery by recruiting 20,000 new police, providing an extra £2.2 billion for the courts, prisons and probation services, and committing £3.8 billion to the largest prison-building programme in a generation.

World-class public services are made possible only by the hard work of the private sector and the genius of the free market—a point made brilliantly by my neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Jacob Young). That is why we are choosing to ignite even greater public sector success by investing in our economic infrastructure, improving skills and supporting innovation, with commitments to boost R&D funding and access to early stage equity finance.

To make sure that work pays, we are increasing the national living wage, cutting the universal credit taper rate and increasing the universal credit work allowance by £500 a year. That was the subject of a powerful speech by my right hon. Friend the Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Stephen Crabb) and likewise by my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely).