Finance Bill

Lord McKenzie of Luton Excerpts

2nd reading & Committee negatived & 3rd reading & 2nd reading (Hansard) & 2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & 3rd reading (Hansard) & 3rd reading (Hansard): House of Lords & Committee negatived (Hansard) & Committee negatived (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 17th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord McKenzie of Luton (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, Covid-19 has changed all our lives in a way that we might have thought unimaginable a few months ago. With optimism for a V-shaped recovery receding and facing a 12.8% fall in GDP this year, and with public sector borrowing in excess of £500 billion, we face difficult times. Levels of borrowing that might previously have been said to be indefensible, dangerous and unsustainable are now being viewed as mainstream.

With the reality of major job losses growing apace, and faced with the changing norms of ongoing social distancing, working at home, changing supply chains and accelerated use of technology—just look at this place, for example—life has changed. The world of work has changed, and will change more after Brexit, and I do not think it will spring back any time soon. If it is to, where are the signs to suggest that it will?

The pandemic has brought home that, in times of crisis, we have to look to and engage the power of the state to find solutions and to provide resource and direction, nowhere more so than in tackling unemployment. It is to the state that we must look to build a safety net—the social security system newly enthused by those who hitherto never imagined that they should need recourse to it and who now have to engage with the paucity of its provision and the frustrations of its complexity. Of course, this will necessitate more borrowing, but one of the lessons we have directly learned is that levels of public borrowing must not be bound by the orthodoxy of the past. We need jobs as the priority.

One of the lessons, as we see from its nightly inclusion in people’s lives through our TV screens, is the spotlight being shone on just how unequal is the society in which we live and how fragile the financial resilience of many families—evidenced by growth in access to food banks, for example. With the poorest one-fifth of households suffering a 7% fall in income, how do we find this acceptable?