Autumn Budget 2026

Lord Patten Excerpts

Thursday 12th November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Patten (Con)]

I do not want to alarm the noble Lord, but I agreed with much of what he said. I declare my shareholding interest in Persimmon, a housebuilding company.

I have three points to make. First, regarding housebuilding, on the tone and promises of the Budget Statement, other speakers have rightly said that never have so many words been used to so little substance. This was aptly summed up in a prescient way on 30 October on the cover of the New Statesman:

“Britain’s most important fiscal event is nothing more than an elaborate charade”.


It was right this time around not to give covering fire for a Government determined to put voter empathy and hopes way ahead of action and growth policy. No amount of tiny and temporary cost-of-living fixes will do anything to kick-start the desperately needed increase in household incomes through real and lasting economic growth. The promised myriad tiny fixes, stuck together, will not all even come fully into effect by 2029. On the broader scale, the 10-year plan promised in July, which seemed to vanish for a bit from the front pages, has come back. It was briefed by the normal authorised Treasury sources as, “There’s going to be a plan but it’s going to be a ‘high-level blueprint’”. This is urgently needed in order to have some grip on the tough decisions on welfare and defence spending which so many Members on both sides of the House have referred to.

Yet we see how vague hopes of improving living standards, when they are left unfulfilled, will reap an electoral whirlwind, as President Trump experienced only last week. The Government should beware of making all these empathetic statements of “nice to have” this and “nice to have” that without delivering into people’s pockets.

Secondly, the Government say that they want to help hard-working people. I would love the Government to define what they mean by “hard-working people”; it seems partial, to put it mildly. We certainly need hard-working and taxpaying people in all sorts of jobs—from truck drivers to financial services and back. They are exactly the same, yet the Government do not like openly to welcome the people who pay their taxes for welfare and defence, living as they currently do as financial driftwood, with the frozen thresholds dragging more and more people into marginal tax. Are these people welcome in the financial services? I would love to hear the Minister say that they may well be doing something useful, if only paying taxes.

There is also little to encourage giving in the Budget, just in passing. We all value charities. British people are very good at charities, but there is nothing in the Budget to encourage charities, which are going through a very difficult time. Great charities such as Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation are getting rid of paid staff and volunteers and shutting down their houses and property in high streets, which usually figure in those pictures of declining retail outlets with no one much left apart from charity shops. There are not going to be many charity shops anymore on those high streets.

Lastly, on housing, there is no need to promote what the Prime Minister loves to have promoted—a national conversation. I have no idea what a national conversation is, but it is a much-loved trope of the Government. The national conversation needs to involve not just housebuilders and house owners but people who are renting. We have nothing in the housing sector to promote the two together.

We have a hecatomb of bricks. This has been pointed out by brickmakers such as Ibstock and by the GMB trade union, which has an excellent research outfit that says it has more bricks than it knows what to do with. The GMB says that it has 500 million bricks—enough to build 50,000 homes. That is a mountain of bricks almost as high as the pile of government promises to build more houses, which are simply not going to be fulfilled.