Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Lord Hammond of Runnymede and Jonathan Edwards

Tuesday 22nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Philip Hammond]

A pilot railcard for that age group was launched as a trial, and was fully subscribed very quickly. The Department for Transport will be announcing in due course when the continuation of the scheme will take place.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

As the Minister knows, the communities that I represent in Carmarthenshire received the highest form of EU structural aid. Will he give a guarantee that they will not lose a single penny following the introduction of the UK Shared Prosperity Fund?

[Mr Hammond]

As I think I have already said earlier in this session, we will be consulting, during the course of this year, on the design of the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, the scope and scale of the fund and how the money in the fund should be allocated. I look forward to the hon. Gentleman’s input to that consultation.

Spring Statement

Debate between Lord Hammond of Runnymede and Jonathan Edwards

Tuesday 13th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

I am glad to be able to tell my hon. Friend that there will be 20 construction skills villages. We look forward to the bid from Redditch, and I am sure that it will be considered carefully.

As I said earlier, my right hon. Friend the Education Secretary is contributing an extra £80 million specifically to help small businesses that are non-levy payers with the costs of engaging apprentices, and from April many small businesses will benefit from the flexibility that allows large business levy payers to transfer 10% of their levy funds to small businesses in their supply chain. The impression that I have from talking to the CBI and other organisations is that businesses are keen to do that, and many of them will make such transfers.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

Is the OBR right to calculate in its report that the United Kingdom will be making payments to the European Union until 2064 as part of the divorce settlement and that that will not include any new commitments that the British Government may make in the remaining parts of the negotiation? Would it not be better just to stay in the EU?

[Mr Hammond]

The payment profile has three parts. There are payments during the two years—more or less—of the implementation period; there are payments as the EU dispenses the so-called reste à liquider over the following few years; and then there is a very long tail of what will actually be very small payments relating to pensions. Of course, by their nature, they will stretch over a very long period, but they are very small amounts of money.

Economy and Jobs

Debate between Lord Hammond of Runnymede and Jonathan Edwards

Thursday 29th June 2017 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hammond]

Let me do the maths. Hmm, it would be £1.5 trillion that they raise. Perhaps one of my hon. Friends will check down the back of the Treasury Bench in case the previous Chancellor hid that away down there. As usual, the right hon. Gentleman is talking absolute nonsense.

[Jonathan Edwards (Carmarthen East and Dinefwr) (PC)]

Will the Chancellor give way?

[Mr Hammond]

I want to make a little progress, but I will give way in a moment.

I have set out our record, but the British people did not get where they are today by admiring their achievements. We have work to do: we have to negotiate our future relationship with the EU; we have to enhance our global competitiveness through raising our productivity; we have to rise to the challenge of sustaining our public services in the face of demographic pressure; we have to address the needs of our population for affordable routes into home ownership; and we have to show the courage and vision to grasp the opportunities ahead. We will meet those challenges head on, as we have always done, with a plan that builds on the strengths of our economy, not one that denigrates them.

Let me say something about our public services and their funding. We all value our public services and the people who provide them to us. Health and social care, education, roads, local authority services, police, fire and rescue, defence and the many, many other services we enjoy all form part of the vital fabric of our society and contribute to the vibrancy of our communities. The challenge of funding those public services is accentuated by the changing age profile of the population, which necessitates a proper debate about how to make the funding of public services sustainable not just next year, but over the decades of demographic change to come. We have to be clear about the choices and what they mean because there are no free lunches or money trees in the real world, and all decisions have consequences.

There are three ways for the Government to increase spending on public services: higher taxes, higher borrowing or higher growth. Higher taxes have a cost in terms of business investment, economic growth and take-home pay. Conservatives are instinctively in favour of keeping taxes as low as possible so that business can continue to create high-quality jobs and hard-working people can keep more of the money that they earn. That is why we reject Labour’s manifesto plan, which would, according to the IFS, take taxation to its highest ever peacetime level. The right hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington is not listening, but—[Interruption.] Pay attention. If he wants to make the case for higher taxation to fund public services, will he at least make this a grown-up debate? Will he at least ask voters whether they want to pay higher taxes to fund public services, not whether they would like someone else to pay higher taxes? As Ed Balls reminds us, in the real world, it is ordinary people who pay.

When we already have an eye-watering amount of debt, higher borrowing makes our economy vulnerable to future shocks. With £1.7 trillion of national debt outstanding and an annual interest bill of £50 billion, even at the current low rates, we should be reducing debt, not increasing it. However, borrowing means something else, too. It means that we are asking the next generations—our children and our grandchildren—to consume less in their lifetimes to pay for our consumption today. That is simply not fair; it is the opposite of sustainable.

[Mr Hammond]

As I have already said, if it were ever to look like the shadow Chancellor was anywhere near having his hand on the lever of power, I suspect that his programme, given what we know about his values and principles around the management of the economy, would lead to a pretty sharp rise in interest rates.

We must continue the job of getting our public finances back in order, over a sensible period of time, so that we are living within our means. The shadow Chancellor referred to the decision in my first autumn statement to push back the date on which we will reach fiscal balance. I made that decision to protect our economy during a period of uncertainty due to our exit negotiations from the European Union, therefore giving ourselves a little more headroom to respond should the economy need support. I would have thought that the right hon. Gentleman welcomed that measure.

The only fair and sustainable way to fund better public services, higher real wages, and increased living standards—[Interruption.] I say to the Opposition Front-Bench team that that is absolutely not the way to do it. The only fair and sustainable approach is to increase economic growth through higher productivity. Our plan will support our public services and living standards.

[Jonathan Edwards]

Based on the rosy picture that the Chancellor has been endeavouring to portray this afternoon, will he explain why Britain has the worst-performing economy in the G7 under his watch?

[Mr Hammond]

The hon. Gentleman is wrong. Last year, the British economy was the second-fastest growing in the G7 after Germany. In the year before that, our economy was the second-fasting growing after the United States.