Autumn Budget 2025

Lord Elliott of Mickle Fell Excerpts

Thursday 4th December 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Elliott of Mickle Fell (Con)]

My Lords, I will focus on two distinct groups in society: those on welfare requiring work; and wealth creators, who are vital to job creation. Both groups have been let down by the Budget. The welfare changes are not geared towards helping people into work, and the tax rises further repel the people who create jobs.

First, on welfare to work, according to page 65 of the OBR’s forecast, the Government’s welfare measures will help just 55,000 people into work over the next four years—a long way off the 2.2 million people who require jobs for us to get back to 80% employment. Let us not forget that the OBR’s calculations do not factor in the Employment Rights Bill, which even the Resolution Foundation recognises will hinder getting people into work.

Sir Charlie Mayfield’s review into employment for the long-term sick is a truly superb piece of work, but its conclusions need to be implemented at pace. As things stand, to get the number of people on long-term sickness down to 2019 levels, we will have to wait until 2078. This worklessness is a fiscal millstone around the economy’s neck. Paying for the £34 billion increase in universal credit and disability benefits will absorb all of the income tax receipts from Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the north-east and Lincolnshire combined.

That said, the Government are having more success in their efforts to reduce the rate of relative poverty. Why is that? With 16,500 millionaires set to leave the UK this year alone, relative poverty as a measure will improve as our economic prospects suffer. These wealth creators take two valuable things with them: tax revenue and jobs. A former Labour donor, Lakshmi Mittal, who has previously topped the Sunday Times rich list, has left for Switzerland. The CEO of Revolut and the founder of Improbable have both left for Dubai. Optasia has cancelled its plans to list on the London Stock Exchange, opting instead for South Africa. In the words of its founder,

“we have looked at it from every angle and it just doesn’t make sense to stay here”.

Page 82 of the OBR forecast is right to describe the predicted £34 billion revenue from last year’s non-dom tax changes as “highly uncertain”. The temporary repatriation facility will yield nothing like the sums the Government are currently banking on.

There is a long history of people leaving sclerotic economies to join prosperous ones. Whether from East Germany to West Germany, North Korea to South Korea or California to Texas, the exodus of talent and taxpayers is nothing new. Of the 693,000 people who have left the UK in the past year, a disproportionate number are entrepreneurs, investors, employers, philanthropists and, crucially, the wealth creators and job creators of the future. This brings me back to worklessness. We need to create an additional 1.4 million new jobs to get the employment rate back up to 80%. Who will create these jobs if the job creators are leaving?

When the Prime Minister launched the Labour Party’s manifesto, he said:

“With Labour, those who can work, will work. We want more people into work … to get the benefits bill down”.


He went on:

“When I say our number one mission is economic growth, you could say our number one mission is wealth creation”.


I could not put it better myself. I hope that the Government revert to this approach. Not only is it what the public want; more importantly, it is the key to prosperity through growth.