Autumn Statement 2023

Lord Frost Excerpts

Wednesday 29th November 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by welcoming my noble friend to her new role in the Treasury. I speak in this debate more because I feel obliged to than because I really want to. I am well aware that the Government have stopped listening to Conservatives with my opinions, but I will give them anyway. I had hoped last week that we would get a Statement and set of measures that acknowledged that Britain has been on the wrong track and that a radical change of direction is needed. I am afraid that instead we got some palliatives—obviously, these are welcome—some attempts to soften the direction of travel, which remains wrong. We got a Statement that, I am sorry to say, does all too little to persuade the British people that we, as the governing party, have solutions capable of solving the country’s problems, and that makes it far too easy for voters to believe the falsehood that there is no real difference between Conservative philosophy and those of the parties opposite.

If I am honest, I am tired of pretending that I think we are on the right track. I meet many Conservative members and voters—former voters, all too often, I am afraid—and even quite a few Ministers who do not think we are either. Even with the reduced tax increases that we saw in the Autumn Statement, we are still heading for the highest levels of tax and spend ever seen in this country outside wartime. Not surprisingly, economic growth is anaemic. Yes, as my noble friend the Minister said, we are outperforming the gloomiest predictions of the OBR, let alone the pre-Brexit Treasury prophecies of doom. However, as noble Lords will see if they look at the Angus Maddison database, which has been measuring this country’s growth for the last 700 years, we have had pre-modern growth rates since the financial crash, with a per capita growth rate roughly that of Britain during Queen Victoria’s reign.

Many, perhaps most, European countries are doing just as badly as us, if not worse, but we are one of the few that has the powers to solve the problems. Instead, what are we doing? We are spending more money than ever on the National Health Service—indeed, we are one of the top 10 spenders per head globally—and getting worse and worse results for it. We are paying huge sums on welfare and pensions, yet the only solutions we have are the very gentle carrots of encouraging people back into work, rather than a bit more of the effective stick of reducing welfare for people who choose not to work.

We are sucking in huge numbers of immigrants to try to fill the gap—or rather not, because we still have a million job vacancies. We are building nowhere near enough houses. We have heard from many noble Lords already many wishes, many calls—very well justified, I am sure—for more public spending on favourite causes, but the truth is that we are trying to provide public services as if the economy were growing by 3% a year when the real figure is 1%. That just cannot be done and we are now feeling the pain.

It is not as if any of this is a secret. Outside this building, people talk about these real-world problems all the time. They do not talk about smoking bans or A-level reform. The party I am a member of has been in power for 13 years and, I am afraid to say, bears much responsibility for problems I have just outlined. I spent the best part of three years working to get this country out of the EU in a way that gave us full optionality about the future, and I believe we largely succeeded in that. But we have not fully used those powers and often seem frightened to. The Windsor Framework—trumpeted as an achievement but actually doing significant political and economic harm to the unity of this country—makes it even harder to do anything differently.

But it is more than that. I worry we have all been captured by the socialist belief that government regulation and spending is the way to solve our economic problems, that vast taxpayer subsidies to all kinds of politically favoured industries—productive, or more often not—such as semiconductors, windmills, batteries, the hydrogen boondoggle, electric cars, zero-carbon steel or aviation are going to solve our economic problems, despite all the evidence that government direction of the economy never works out well. I would like to see policymakers paying less attention to the many snake-oil proponents of the so-called active state and spend a bit more time reminding themselves of Hayek’s essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society”.

The truth is that we need to get on to a different path if we are to boost economic growth, which is overwhelmingly what we need to do. The first duty we owe to the people of this country is honesty about the nature of our problems and how we can solve them. The only way we can get growth and incomes up again is to release the forces of the private sector—removing the crushing tax and regulatory burdens, dramatically reforming planning and building many more houses, slowing or halting the collectivist delusion of net zero, ending the war on SMEs and the self-employed, beginning to cut public spending by cutting the functions of government and by properly reforming the great public sector entities. At the same time, we must show that the Government have a grip and can perform their core functions, most obviously on immigration where we must be ready to shake ourselves free from the many constraints that seem to leave us frozen in immobility.

The Autumn Statement dips a toe in all these waters, notably with the national insurance cuts and full expensing—these are to be welcomed, as they are a signal that there is understanding of what is going wrong—but it does all too little to challenge, let alone hold back, the tide of statism, miserabilism and nannyism that risks overwhelming this country. We can still change that, so I ask my noble friend the Minister and beg my Government to show that they are listening to our voters and the country, to stop being swept along by the collectivist current and to change course—to act before the election, before it is too late.