Lord Londesborough
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(1 week, 2 days ago)
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Lord Livermore (Lab)
I completely agree with my noble friend, and I am grateful to him for what he says. It is absolutely no approach to say that we should continue a previous Government’s cover-up and not be honest about the difficulties in the public finances. It is also completely wrong to say that we were wrong to deal with those challenges and should instead have maintained what my noble friend describes as a £22 billion black hole in the public finances. We were absolutely right to do what we did. We know that there are costs to responsibility, but the cost to irresponsibility would have been far greater—we saw that in the Liz Truss mini-Budget. Repeating the failures of the last 14 years is exactly not what the British economy needs.
Lord Londesborough (CB)
My Lords, taking together the impact of national insurance contribution increases and the 6.7% hike in the national minimum wage, can the Minister explain how raising the cost of employment by an average of £2,400 per employee is consistent with boosting economic growth?
Lord Livermore (Lab)
I am sorry that the noble Lord is not able to support the increases in the national minimum wage; that is a shame to hear. I do not know whether he was able to read the monetary policy report that was published alongside the growth forecast last week, but the Bank of England said that the combined effects of the measures in the Autumn Budget are expected to boost the level of GDP by around 0.75%.