Budget Statement

Lord Davies of Oldham Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd November 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Davies of Oldham (Lab)]

My Lords, I owe the Committee an early apology. I resigned from the Front Bench after more than 10 years in that role, from the time that we formed the Opposition, way back in 2010. I had therefore expected to play the normal, critical Back-Bench role in this Committee meeting today and found myself suddenly precipitated into a Front-Bench role. I am not sure that I will be entirely secure in this position after 10 years of absence, but I know that my noble friends will back me up and fill in any gaps that I inadvertently leave.

The Chancellor was enormously upbeat when he presented his Budget a short while ago. The problem is that the realities that face many low-income and middle-income families are far from optimistic. As a nation, we are enjoined to be optimistic in circumstances where certain facts have to be grasped because, until they are adequately tackled, we have no basis on which to expect good results.

The Minister made no reference to the Resolution Foundation—Ministers do not and he therefore follows a good tradition—but the Resolution Foundation regards the position of public finances very differently from the Chancellor. We think that placing the highest burden on people who have the lowest income is gratuitously and outstandingly unfair. It is the Conservative Party being loyal to its principles, of course, but that does not make them any more attractive. How on earth people are expected to cope with the cuts to credit that are envisaged in the Budget I do not know. What I know is that, whereas the Chancellor talks of prosperity, certain categories of people are destined to pay a heavy price indeed.

That tends to be the case when we look across areas of government policy. I will take one area in which the Government have waxed lyrical recently—extra funding for schools. They did not preface it with any apology at all for the absolute devastation that has been forced on further education over a decade of Conservative rule; that is to be brushed under the carpet. Our side welcomes the sinner coming to repentance with the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill and development of lifelong learning, which have an important dimension of enhancement for people. But at this stage I warn the Chancellor, in case he has not recognised, as he has not for a number of other issues in his Budget, that this costs a great deal of money. We will be watching the Government and making sure that, during their time in power, they match those requirements.

With this buoyant optimism that exists all around, have the Government recognised their political optimism? “Well, we do not face the electorate for a number of years and there are certain areas where we can see the potential for favourable development.” That says nothing about the burdens on our population at present, in the high costs of food and fuel and the anxieties that people have about whether they will survive this winter, keeping warm, against the outstanding energy costs that they are obliged to meet. There was not much mention of that in the Chancellor’s speech or in the Minister’s speech this afternoon. He covered a fair amount of ground and I congratulate him on that, but he at no stage repaired the obvious damage of omission that could be seen in the Budget Statement and which the country has to live with, for the time being.

The Government pride themselves on certain increases in expenditure—certainly, schools are one. We welcome that. We also note that it only just brings schools’ expenditure per pupil up to the level in 2010, when the Government first came to power. We also recognise that schools are having to recover in a more dramatic way from the pandemic. They are going to find it very difficult, even with the limited increased resources supplied by the Government, to ensure that our students do not face irreparable loss of years of learning, which are difficult to make up.

This is a Budget which enabled the Minister to select and emphasise his favoured bits, but the country has to face the Budget as a whole. What is actually clear is how much this Budget bears heavily down on the less well off in our society, while we are seeing tax breaks for the particularly well off. It is a Conservative Budget all right, and none the better for that.